ads' corner

Last year I posted about how to configure "locales" in Debian or Ubuntu, using Ansible. Back then I did not know that there is an Ansible "debconf" module available, and I have no idea how I could miss it. Anyway, this makes things a bit easier, but not much.

First of all, the module let's you both set and query values. However because the "locales" package does not use debconf for the list of locales, but stores this list in /etc/locale.gen, things are still unnecessary complicated. But I managed to get it working without having to use an additional file as flag if this step was completed before.

Missing locale settings will result in error messages like:

ads@ansible-ubuntu-03:~$ perl --version
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = "en_US:en",
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LC_PAPER = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LC_ADDRESS = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LC_MONETARY = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LC_NUMERIC = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LC_TELEPHONE = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LC_IDENTIFICATION = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LC_MEASUREMENT = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LC_TIME = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LC_NAME = "de_DE.UTF-8",
        LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").

This can be configured, but unfortunately the "locale" package does not use the debconf database. This makes it more complicated to configure the locales settings using Ansible.