On 10/26/2013 07:46 PM, Glenn English wrote:
On Oct 26, 2013, at 2:30 PM, Jape Person wrote:
I'm sure you were right to first suspect locale settings. It's really the most
obvious culprit. Are those the same for the systems that have the problem and
those that don't?
In all, "egrep -v ^# /etc/locale.gen" says "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8".
I'm looking forward to seeing what you learn about this. As I said, I know I've
seen the behavior before and have been mystified by it, but only briefly
because it went away (IIRC) after a reboot.
Well, I'll be damned! That grep returned the same string on all but the Lenny
box -- and on that one, the only difference was that it said the same thing
twice.
I looked at the file on Lenny, and the locale was un-commented out at place up
in the long list of commented out choices, and it was added as a last line. I
edited on one of the Wheezy boxes, and the locale choice was only the last
line. So I found it (commented out) up in the list, removed the '# ' and
rebooted.
And Aptitude got well.
I have no explanation whatsoever for this, but thanks very much for your
suggestion.
And I thought weird stuff like this only happened to me.
...
OK. I give up. I just spent the afternoon doing the same things on the other
Wheezy boxes (directly from their consoles), and some of the locale.gen files
were one way, and some weren't; after editing, sometimes Aptitude worked from
the console, and sometimes it got worse. Then I went back to the Mac and
restarted the terminal program on the Mac and re-established the ssh
connections, and now they're all OK from the Mac. They weren't from their
consoles. And ssh'ing around between them gave various results.
Last time I looked.
If somebody has a possible explanation for this, I'd sure like to hear it. But
unless I do, I'm just going to assume that Aptitude makes its dialog boxes from
character sets selected at random and stop whining about it. As long as it does
the rest of its job reasonably well, I can live with cosmetic problems...
Well, that's odd. I'm afraid the only non-GNU/Linux systems at my
disposal are Windows systems that I herd (like cats) for a client. But I
do manage a bunch of Debian testing systems -- some locally and some
remotely by ssh connection -- and none of them has exhibited an odd
display in aptitude's interactive user interface. (It's how I handle
system upgrades on all of the Debian systems, so I see it daily.)
Besides the lack of a Mac in the mix, the other difference in my systems
from yours is the lack of Lenny or Wheezy in the mix. (Yup, my Debian
systems are all the same version, testing.)
But I have seen the substitution of textual characters for line-drawing
characters on some TUI dialogs in the past. I'm pretty sure it always
happened during software upgrades. I didn't remark when or in exactly
what circumstances because it didn't persist. Still, I'm tempted to
think the cause for what you are seeing might be related.
I'll watch with interest.
Best,
Jape
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