On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 5:50 AM Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
Hi Luigi,

here on Debian we got a bug report that luatex cannot build formats
under a broken locale. I can reproduce this on standard TeX Live, too:
        $ LC_TIME=en_DE.UTF-8 luatex -ini   -jobname=luatex -progname=luatex luatex.ini
        Unable to read environment locale: exit now.
        $
(same on dev version)

It comes from the code of luainit
        env_locale = setlocale (LC_ALL, "");
        if (!env_locale && !lua_only) {
            fprintf(stderr,"Unable to read environment locale: exit now.\n");
            exit(1);
        }

I agree that the locale is completely broken, and the system does not
support this locale.

BUT it would be nice if luatex would not crash on such a setup, at least
during format build?

WDYT?

It's not a bug,  luatex wants a sane locale  --- building a format or not, it doesn't matter.
We can change it, but for sure not for texlive 2019.
 
--
luigi