Comment 7 for bug 1023421

I'm having the problem, or a similar one, on Linux Mint 18.1 Serena XFCE, which is based on Xenial.

My version of this problem affects many programs, not just update-manager:

man: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
 LANGUAGE = (unset),
 LC_ALL = (unset),
 LANG = "en_US"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

"pip" doesn't run at all. locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

So I did: (% is the shell prompt)

% locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
LC_TIME="en_US"
LC_COLLATE="en_US"
LC_MONETARY="en_US"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
LC_PAPER="en_US"
LC_NAME="en_US"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US"
LC_ALL=
% grep en_US /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15
% LANG=en_US.UTF-8
% man {some program}
# Now the error message isn't displayed! -- and likewise in programs that use Perl.

I'm having the issue with en_US (no other locale has ever been selected in this OS install), *not* one of the locales mentioned in the linked bug-report https://bugs.python.org/issue20087

I was getting the same error messages in Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 "Betsy", which is based on Debian stable/jessie. I can do a little more testing on that OS install if it's relevant to this bug report.

I searched on Launchpad for similar issues, but this one I'm commenting in is the closest one I've found.

Of course, I can put a file in /etc/profile.d/ to set LANG=en_US.UTF-8 when anyone logs in, but I hope a bug report has been, or will be, filed against the relevant package.

Please let me know if there is a more appropriate bug report I should monitor and/or comment in.