perl: warning: Setting locale failed after migration to nixos-22.11 channel

[datafoo]

Describe the bug

When and after migrating to nixos-22.11 channel, I noticed a warning :

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = "",
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LC_TIME = "nb_NO.UTF-8",
        LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").

Steps To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Put the following in your configuration.nix:

   i18n.defaultLocale = "en_US.UTF-8";
   console = {
     font = "Lat2-Terminus16";
     keyMap = "no";
   };
   services.xserver.layout = "no";

2. Rebuild your system
3. Type the Norwegian character ø in a terminal, as root user
4. Notice the perl warning before ø: command not found

   # ø
   perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
   perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
           LANGUAGE = "",
           LC_ALL = (unset),
           LC_TIME = "nb_NO.UTF-8",
           LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
       are supported and installed on your system.
   perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").
   ø: command not found

Expected behavior

No warning should appear.

Notify maintainers

@SuperSandro2000 (related to #177318)

Metadata

[user@system:~]$ nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"
 - system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 5.15.81, NixOS, 22.11 (Raccoon), 22.11.656.52e3e80afff`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.11.0`
 - channels(me): `"home-manager-22.11.tar.gz"`
 - channels(root): `"nixos-22.11"`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos`

[datafoo]

I am not sure LC_TIME = "nb_NO.UTF-8" is because of console.keyMap or services.xserver.layout.

[scvalex]

FWIW I just ran into this with en_GB.UTF-8.

Empirically, it affected the machines where I had set time.timeZone = "Europe/London";. The fix was to set i18n.defaultLocale = "en_GB.UTF-8"; which causes the default value of i18n.supportedLocales to include it, which then presumably causes the locale to be built.

[datafoo]

LC_TIME = "nb_NO.UTF-8" was because I set Norwegian in the regional settings of my non-root user (which modifies ~/.config/plasma-localerc ).

Now I have the following more advanced settings which were also set with plasma UI (not declaratively).

$ cat ~/.config/plasma-localerc 
[Formats]
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_NAME=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_PAGE=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=nb_NO.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
useDetailed=true

And I made the problem disappear by adding this in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

i18n = {
  defaultLocale = "en_US.UTF-8";
  supportedLocales = [
    "C.UTF-8/UTF-8"
    "en_US.UTF-8/UTF-8"
    "en_GB.UTF-8/UTF-8"
    "nb_NO.UTF-8/UTF-8"
  ];
};

Perhaps there is a way to configure my user regional settings in a declarative way that would be taken into account so that I do not have to explicitly specify i18n.supportedLocales.

[joepie91]

Could you reopen this? This is IMO a breaking bug in the 22.11 release, and the entry in the release notes really isn't anywhere near clear enough about the potential for breakage.

Edit: In my case, manually adding the relevant locales to supportedLocales did not fix it. I had to add the "all" entry instead.

[yapvoonyee]

Thanks this works. But I wonder if my computer is now stuck in the USA and not Australia?