[Fedora-packaging] Can I rely on having UTF-8-locale during koji-build?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 5:27 AM, Björn Esser <bjoern.esser at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello list!
>
> Can I rely on having "en_US.UTF-8" inside a koji-build?
> Or in other words:
>
> Is it allowed to do this in spec?
>
> %build
> export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
> ...
>
> Do I need to have BuildRequires on something providing UTF-8-locales?
>

Generally I would consider it a bug if a package requires setting
LC_*.  Users come from many different countries and unfortunately,
UTF-8 isn't standard in all of those :-(.  Also, cron jobs get run
using the C locale so code that can end up running there (all
libraries for instance) could be broken.

If you're only having to set this for building the package, not for
testing it at runtime, this might be okay... I'd say that you should
definitely dive into the buildsystem/code, though, to make sure that
there isn't a runtime requirement as well.

-Toshio