Bug#1133120: /usr/sbin/locale-gen: locale-gen should respect local admin's choice to use /etc/locale.alias

Package: locales
Version: 2.42-14
Severity: normal
File: /usr/sbin/locale-gen
Tags: l10n
X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected]

Dear Maintainer,

Bug #1095101 requested that the file /etc/locale.alias be dropped from
being unpacked on Debian. 

However, when that bug was closed, the actual change went further and
modified /usr/sbin/locale-gen so that locale.alias is ignored even if a
local site admin later creates it.

Note that while the file was considered harmful because it was being
installed with links to _non_-UTF-8 locales, /etc/locale.alias is also
the way that Debian has traditionally allowed sites to alias UTF-8
locales.

I am requesting that the changes to the /usr/sbin/locale-gen program
be reverted. Doing so will still satisfy Bug #1095101. I am not asking
Debian to include any links to non-UTF-8 locales.

Thank you.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: forky/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.19.10+deb14-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages locales depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.92
ii  libc-bin               2.42-14
ii  libc-l10n              2.42-14

locales recommends no packages.

locales suggests no packages.

-- debconf information excluded

-- debsums errors found:
debsums: changed file /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED (from locales package)