Locales were not being generated by dpkg-reconfigure locales

Question

According to this problem that I've encountered today: Locale not setting on Debian

I have solved my problem by running sudo apt-get install locales-all. But one question - what is sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales actually doing? Somebody said (somewhere else on the internet), that it is generating chosen locales. But for me - it wasn't doing anything. The locales were nowhere to be found on the system, thus those lines were popping up:

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_COLLATE to default locale: No such file or directory

After running the command once again (sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales) - after installing them by apt-get install of course, and choosing en_US.UTF-8, a message popped up:

locales-all installed, skipping locales generation

Which is understandable. I have just downloaded a package with all of the locales. So why dpkg-reconfigure locales didn't generate it first?

Answer 1

I think I haven't done that before when I was initially solving this problem, but I think the thing is - I haven't uncommented certain locales in /etc/locale.gen. I guess this solution will work for some people in the future.

After uncommenting en_US locales (or any others that you would want to be generated) in that file (/etc/locale.gen), and using locale-gen command it has started generating those locales that I have uncommented. After doing that, I have checked dpkg-reconfigure locales and those locales that have been generated by locale-gen command were marked with an asterisk (*), which means they have been already generated.

So I guess you can do it that way, or just install all of the locales with apt.