[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#866023: "gpg: signing failed: A locale function failed" when GnuPG User ID is non-ASCII

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Package: sbuild
Version: 0.73.0-4
Severity: normal

I got a report on IRC that sbuild was failing during its signing phase
with the error message:

    gpg: signing failed: A locale function failed

but normal gpg signing was working fine.

I tracked this down to what appears to be an upstream bug with
pinentry when trying to sign in LC_ALL=C when the User ID for the
signing key has a non-ASCII character in it:

    https://dev.gnupg.org/T3222

However, sbuild shouldn't be enforcing a C (or any other non-UTF-8)
locale during the signing phase, so there's something wrong with
sbuild too.

Looking in the source for sbuild, i think it looks like it's setting
C.UTF-8 which shouldn't have this problem.  But the problem happens
anyway, and i haven't been able to track it down further.

My attempt at building that let me replicate this error was:

    sbuild -d sid-amd64-sbuild -k $KEYID $DSCNAME

(where $KEYID refered to a secret key i have access to with only one
User ID.  That User ID was 'Test Usér <tester at example.net>')

        --dkg

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers testing-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'testing'), (200, 'unstable-debug'), (200, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.11.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)