Package: autopkgtest Version: 5.22 Severity: normal It turns out that the lxc containers built by autopkgtest-build-lxc depend on the LANG setting. An example of where this made a difference is below.
Suggested patch: just add "export LANG=C.UTF-8" somewhere early in /usr/bin/autopkgtest-build-lxc Here's an example of where this caused an issue. I was trying to patch pymca. Version 5.7.1+dfsg-1 was in the archive and was recorded as passing its autopkgtests on ci.debian.net. But when I tried to run autopkgtest on it on my system (using an lxc container created with autopkgtest-build-lxc), it failed. The reason for this was that one of the Python test scripts effectively did the following: import locale current_locale = locale.getlocale() locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, current_locale) Now, the autopkgtest script is run with LANG, LANGUAGE and LC_* all unset, so Python sets current_locale to the default, which would be C.UTF-8, except that this is translated into en_US.UTF-8. Then locale.setlocale() failed because I don't have the en_US.UTF-8 locale in my container: it was built with LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, so the only locale I had was this (and C.UTF-8). Presumably, therefore, the ci.debian.net containers were built with either LANG unset or set to C.UTF-8 or to en_US.UTF-8 (see line 128 onwards of /usr/share/lxc/templates/lxc-debian), so they ran this Python code with no difficulty, whereas I couldn't. A solution for this package was for the tests to depend on locales-all, but it just highlighted the sensitivity of the tests to the locale installed in the container. Best wishes, Julian
