[tor-bugs] #33042 [Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin Team]: switch servers to a UTF-8 locale by default

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#33042: switch servers to a UTF-8 locale by default
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     Reporter:  anarcat                              |      Owner:  tpa
         Type:  task                                 |     Status:  new
     Priority:  High                                 |  Milestone:
    Component:  Internal Services/Tor Sysadmin Team  |    Version:
     Severity:  Major                                |   Keywords:
Actual Points:                                       |  Parent ID:
       Points:                                       |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:                                       |
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 no one probably ever noticed this, but our servers all run on a plain "C"
 locale, which means many programs cannot parse UTF-8 characters by
 default.

 this was mostly not a problem: until very recently, SSH client's
 environment would propagate to the server, which means many users had, in
 effect, a UTF-8 locale. mine, for example, is fr_CA.UTF-8.

 but that also meant that error messages would get translated into whatever
 language the user is using, which made collaboration harder. so this was
 turned off in:

 {{{
 commit 1e1fc35ef105b854456586815dd093e27f80635e
 Author: Antoine Beaupré <anarcat at debian.org>
 Date:   Tue Jan 21 16:02:34 2020 -0500

     do accept LANG or LC_* variables in sshd

     While it's great that Debian GNU/Linux translates its messages for
     users all over the world, the Tor Project is an international
     community where it's preferable to communicate in the current "lingua
     franca", english. By accepting client-specific locales, we are
     breaking that common language and making it harder to collaborate.

     This also happens to irritate weasel because my locale is french and
     that leaks out to some error messages and output in my
     copy-pastes. This should solve the problem for him, hopefully,
     eventually.

 diff --git a/modules/ssh/templates/sshd_config.erb
 b/modules/ssh/templates/sshd_config.erb
 index c79b3a9b..6b63b429 100644
 --- a/modules/ssh/templates/sshd_config.erb
 +++ b/modules/ssh/templates/sshd_config.erb
 @@ -113,7 +113,7 @@ TCPKeepAlive yes
  #Banner none

  # Allow client to pass locale environment variables
 -AcceptEnv LANG LC_*
 +#AcceptEnv LANG LC_*

  # override default of no subsystems
  Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
 }}}

 Unfortunately, this had the effect of turning my environment into a plain,
 default locale, which is "Not set" according to `dpkg-reconfigure
 locales`, which probably means the default `C` locale.

 This meant I started getting weird errors. One of those happened while
 starting vim, for example:

 {{{
 root at fsn-node-03:~# vim
 Error detected while processing /root/.vimrc:
 line   13:
 E474: Invalid argument: listchars=tab:»·,trail:·
 Press ENTER or type command to continue
 }}}

 My first reaction was to remove this line at all, which I did in commit
 0bcad064. But then I realized this problem was triggered by the absence of
 a UTF-8 locale.

 So I'm proposing we switch to a C.UTF-8 locale everywhere by default. That
 way at least we'd get unicode to display properly everywhere.

 I'm marking this as high priority because those weird things could happen
 to other people and i don't want to leave this fuzzy situation going on
 for too long.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/33042>
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