Arch Linux

Harkonnen

Member

Registered: 2013-03-24

Posts: 20

Problem with locale-gen

Hi all,

I am having trouble with locale-gen in one of my machines:

$ locale-gen
 en_US.UTF-8...corrupted size vs. prev_size
/usr/bin/locale-gen: line 41: 20567 Aborted                 (core dumped) localedef -i $input -c -f $charset -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias $locale

The problem started while fixing an installation that had been broken by a partial update (damned sudoers). I needed to revert back to an old version of libicuuc for pacman to work, and so I just extracted the required .so files from the old package in the pacman cache and copied them over /usr/lib/. I then ran pacman -Syu to run a full update, which fixed most of my issues. However, during the update of glibc, I got an error due to libicuuc.so.59 not being a symbolic link (I guess I didn't do a cp -a), which made locale-gen fail. Now, manually running locale-gen is broken as shown before. Any help would be kindly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,688

Re: Problem with locale-gen

Looks like you didn't fix it completely. Boot the arch installer, delete all files that belong to packages you suspect to be broken and install them with pacstrap. If you want to be on the safe side, delete all files under pacman's control and re-install your package list with pacstrap. Make use of the different filters for explicit packages and dependencies. Using pacstrap from a live medium prevents you from weird stunts like extracting files manually from your package cache.

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: Problem with locale-gen

You can also use https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pacman-static which should work in most cases where pacman is broken, but the system is still bootable. I host prebuilt binaries signed with my Trusted User signing key.

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

Harkonnen

Member

Registered: 2013-03-24

Posts: 20

Re: Problem with locale-gen

You can also use https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pacman-static which should work in most cases where pacman is broken, but the system is still bootable. I host prebuilt binaries signed with my Trusted User signing key.

That's a very nice tip, as this is a production system that I hope to be able to hotfix + maybe a short reboot. My problem right now is finding out which files are broken, as there is nothing suspicious besides the missing locales. I've found a similar bug which is apparently triggered by missing default locales, so I tried to remove /etc/default/locale, /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive, and any LC_* definitions before running locale-gen, but it insists on misbehaving. I even tried copying a valid locale-archive from a similar installation to see if the missing locales were the problem, but this still breaks as before.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestions. I'll keep working on this and report back if I find a fix or some more useful info.