Disable locale forwarding in OpenSSH
There is a movement towards C.UTF-8 for small images (containers and
VMs). C.UTF-8 has both size and performance improvements over the more
traditional en_US.UTF-8 locale. (The performance improvement is
currently in upstream glibc only, but we plan to bring it to rawhide and
Fedora 35 shortly.)
However, in a world where glibc-langpack-en (or glibc-all-langpacks) is
not installed on target systems, logging in over SSH does not result in
a viable locale if the client use en_US.UTF-8 (or any other locale
except C or C.UTF-8). This causes a severe degradation in user
experience. It's not only that UTF-8 output does not work, there are
also frequent warning messages from various tools. Some may even refuse
to run completely.
I tried to bring up this topic on the OpenSSH list to get some
cross-distribution consensus, but the discussion didn't actually go
anywhere:
Phasing out forwarding of locale settings
<https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/2021-September/03958...
I think Fedora should do this unilaterally, dropping the downstream
additions that enable locale forwarding in both the default client and
server configurations. If we do that, the OpenSSH server will use the
locale as configured with localectl for new interactive and
non-interactive sessions, which is C.UTF-8 in many cases. At least
that's what my testing on Fedora 33 suggests.
Comments?
Thanks,
Florian