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Locales

The locale of the build system might affect the build products. While it is important that developers have access to error messages in the language of their choice, tools which output is influenced by the current locale can make locale a source of reproducibility issues.

There are many aspects regarding locales (see GNU libc locale(1) manpage). The ones that follow are the most important ones to consider in the context of reproducible builds.

Time format

Several common time formatting functions will have output depending on the current locale. On a POSIX system the formatting will depend on the LC_CTIME environment variable, which can be overridden by LC_ALL.

For build systems, it’s thus best to use LC_ALL directly:

$ LC_ALL=C date -u -d '2015-10-21'
Wed Oct 21 00:00:00 UTC 2015

The system timezone and TZ environment variable will also affect the output of time formatting functions.

Collation order

Common sorting functions are affected by the LC_COLLATE environment variable, which can be overridden by LC_ALL. Some locales can be quite surprising.

This typically shows when using sort. The fr_FR locale will sort independently of the character case:

$ echo B a c | tr ' ' '\n' | LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8 sort
a
B
c

The C locale will sort according to the byte values and is always available:

$ echo B a c | tr ' ' '\n' | LC_ALL=C sort
B
a
c

Default character encoding

The default system character encoding will affect both the input and output of many tools. It is defined using the LC_CTYPE environment variable, and can also be overridden using LC_ALL.

Here’s an example when using lynx to convert HTML documentation into text:

LC_ALL=fr_FR lynx -dump -width 72 docs.html | file -
/dev/stdin: ISO-8859 text

The C.UTF-8 pseudo-locale can always be used to get the default strings with UTF-8 output:

LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 lynx -dump -width 72 docs.html | file -
/dev/stdin: UTF-8 Unicode text

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