Solidity: solc crashes without 'export LC_ALL=C'

[AnthonyAkentiev]

System information

Geth version: 1.5.0-unstable
OS & Version: Ubuntu 14.04.4

Expected behaviour

Solc must run normally.

Actual behaviour

It crashes and generates core file.

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

ubuntu@xxx:~/$ locale -a
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
C
C.UTF-8
en_US.utf8
POSIX

ubuntu@xxx:~/$ solc SomeContract.sol
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what():  locale::facet::_S_create_c_locale name not valid
Aborted (core dumped)

Then i added 'export LC_ALL=C' and everything went normally.

[bobsummerwill]

Hey, @AnthonyAkentiev,

Thanks for the report. This seems to be a common issue across all of our C++ applications, and is the reason we have the following steps listed in the building from source:

sudo apt-get -y install language-pack-en-base
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

How did you install your solc? Build from source or apt-get? Perhaps those don't happen for an apt-get install? Or perhaps you followed instructions from Solidity readthedocs which were missing those steps?

The real solution here is https://github.com/ethereum/webthree-umbrella/issues/169 - to force "C" locale at runtime.

This issue popped up for me on a Jolla Sailfish phone too, and I've seen it on Raspberry Pi too. We need to address it at runtime, not rely on the environment to be "good".

[AnthonyAkentiev]

I've installed it using apt-get

[bobsummerwill]

Thanks, @AnthonyAkentiev.

@chriseth FYI ... Looks like the solidity build instructions are missing those locale steps, which would be needed in both "build from source" and "install from PPA", I think.