[Error] HOST_LOCALE not obtained correctly in gentoo

[mid-kid]

Describe the bug
Currently, when entering a distrobox in gentoo, the LANG variable will be set to a locale that's not available in the container.

In gentoo, the locale is set in /etc/env.d/02locale, so it's never picked up in the HOST_LOCALE variable of the distrobox-init script.

I'd suggest setting the LANG variable on container creation instead of parsing the host's configuration, or otherwise providing a way to unconditionally set HOST_LOCALE in a way that overrides host configuration.

[mid-kid]

I ended up fixing it with the following in my distrobox.conf:

container_pre_init_hook='$(
lang=$(echo "$LANG" | sed "s/utf8\$/UTF-8/");
echo HOST_LOCALE="$lang"\;;
echo HOST_LOCALE_ENCODING=$(echo "$lang" | sed -n "s/^[^.]*\.\(.*\)\$/\1/p")\;;
echo HOST_LOCALE_LANG=$(echo "$lang" | sed -n "s/^\([^.]*\)\..*\$/\1/p")\;;
)'

It seems that the update-locale tool from debian isn't happy with ca_ES.utf8 so the utf8 needs to be transformed to UTF-8

[dottorblaster]

@mid-kid I'm really glad you found a way to overcome this, if you can think about some way to write this down we also accept PRs on documentation, thank you so much!

[mid-kid]

@dottorblaster I provided a suggestion, which is to use the environment's $LANG variable, instead of trying to parse non-standard host system configuration. I believe that, or a different solution, should be integrated into distrobox itself, rather than documenting the hack I'm currently using.