Fix locale generation on debian base distros

[paulober]

Proposed Commit Message

fix(debian): Fix locale generation

The current debian apply_locale implementation
depends on a modified locale-gen script that
only exists on ubuntu systems. This patch
fixes the generation of new locales
and should also work on ubuntu
with out the reliance on the custom
locale-gen patch.

Fixes GH-6471

Additional Context

#6471

Test Steps

Try setting a locale on debian 13 with the current cloud-init release. It will run without problems but not generate the selected locale because locale-gen doesn't support locale-gen <locale> but want you select the locales in /etc/locale.gen prior to the execution of this script.

Merge type

• Squash merge using "Proposed Commit Message"
• Rebase and merge unique commits. Requires commit messages per-commit each referencing the pull request number (#<PR_NUM>)

@tdewey-rpi

[paulober]

@blackboxsw

[github-actions]

Hello! Thank you for this proposed change to cloud-init. This pull request is now marked as stale as it has not seen any activity in 14 days. If no activity occurs within the next 7 days, this pull request will automatically close.

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[paulober]

@blackboxsw This is required for locale generation on Debian and related distros (except for ubuntu) to work.

[github-actions]

Hello! Thank you for this proposed change to cloud-init. This pull request is now marked as stale as it has not seen any activity in 14 days. If no activity occurs within the next 7 days, this pull request will automatically close.

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[paulober]

Hello! Thank you for this proposed change to cloud-init. This pull request is now marked as stale as it has not seen any activity in 14 days. If no activity occurs within the next 7 days, this pull request will automatically close.

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@blackboxsw

[github-actions]

Hello! Thank you for this proposed change to cloud-init. This pull request is now marked as stale as it has not seen any activity in 14 days. If no activity occurs within the next 7 days, this pull request will automatically close.

If you are waiting for code review and you are seeing this message, apologies! Please reply, tagging blackboxsw, and he will ensure that someone takes a look soon.

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[paulober]

Hello! Thank you for this proposed change to cloud-init. This pull request is now marked as stale as it has not seen any activity in 14 days. If no activity occurs within the next 7 days, this pull request will automatically close.

If you are waiting for code review and you are seeing this message, apologies! Please reply, tagging blackboxsw, and he will ensure that someone takes a look soon.

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@blackboxsw Please merge this now. Locale gen in cloud-init is currently broken for every Debian based distribution other than Ubuntu.

[blackboxsw]

Thank you @paulober I'll put this on my list this upcoming week. Where I have some concerns is this appears to change behavior by disallowing the addition supplemental locales and disabling other locales on the system. Once I wrap my head around how I'd like us to approach this with clear direction, I'll add a solid review on this.

[blackboxsw]

Adding this to our milestone for the upcoming 26.1 release.

[github-actions]

Hello! Thank you for this proposed change to cloud-init. This pull request is now marked as stale as it has not seen any activity in 14 days. If no activity occurs within the next 7 days, this pull request will automatically close.

If you are waiting for code review and you are seeing this message, apologies! Please reply, tagging blackboxsw, and he will ensure that someone takes a look soon.

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[paulober]

Hello! Thank you for this proposed change to cloud-init. This pull request is now marked as stale as it has not seen any activity in 14 days. If no activity occurs within the next 7 days, this pull request will automatically close.

If you are waiting for code review and you are seeing this message, apologies! Please reply, tagging blackboxsw, and he will ensure that someone takes a look soon.

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@blackboxsw

[blackboxsw]

Thank you @paulober for your extended patience here. I have added some significant requests for testing, a couple of questions about certain locale format support and a suggestion for retaining already generated locales.

We definitely want to retain original behavior where new locales can be added, and we don't want to disable or comment existing locales.

[blackboxsw]

Minimally, we'd need to retain original behavior by only adding new locales, not commenting out pre-existing locales. Additionally, please confirm some of the regex search/compile operations match all expected locale formats/prefixes in unittests.

[blackboxsw]

There is an additional integration test that can be run to validate that we don't degrade expected behavior if you have access to a machine with LXD installed:

CLOUD_INIT_KEEP_INSTANCE=1 CLOUD_INIT_CLOUD_INIT_SOURCE=cloudinit.deb  CLOUD_INIT_CLOUD_INIT_OS_IMAGE=noble tox -e integration-tests -- tests/integration_tests/modules/test_combined.py::TestCombined::test_configured_locale

This test currently fails due to the fact that this PR comments out previously configured locales.

[blackboxsw]

Migrating to 26.2 due to my delayed review. We'll pull this in when we can resolve outstanding questions regarding retained behavior.

[blackboxsw]

Thank you again for the followup @paulober. Things are looking good. One more volley regarding _normalize_locale behavior and a couple of nits. Otherwise I think this is shaping up nicely.

[blackboxsw]

Thank you @paulober. Minor fixes needed throughout this test file to assert --keep-existing is also provided to the locale-gen command.

[blackboxsw]

@paulober changes look good here. Thanks for the updates. All that's left is some unittest fixes in test_debian for --keep-existing

[blackboxsw]

When we are sure tox -e py3 passes all tests, this looks good to me.

[github-actions]

Hello! Thank you for this proposed change to cloud-init. This pull request is now marked as stale as it has not seen any activity in 14 days. If no activity occurs within the next 7 days, this pull request will automatically close.

If you are waiting for code review and you are seeing this message, apologies! Please reply, tagging blackboxsw, and he will ensure that someone takes a look soon.

(If the pull request is closed and you would like to continue working on it, please do tag blackboxsw to reopen it.)