Today, during an upgrade of my workstation's 10.10, I noticed that a lot of unneeded EN locales were being generated, and I wanted to get rid of them. Coming from a debian background, I confidently ran dpkg-reconfigure locales, but instead of getting the usual interface I got

root@brabham:~# dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low locales
Generating locales...
  en_AG.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_AU.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_BW.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_CA.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_DK.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_GB.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_HK.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_IE.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_IN.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_NG.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_NZ.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_PH.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_SG.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_ZA.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_ZW.UTF-8... up-to-date
  it_CH.UTF-8... up-to-date
  it_IT.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.

Odd, isn't it? Well, it turns out that, in order to get rid of the locales you don't want, you have to manually change the files in /var/lib/locales/supported.d. Oh, dear…

OK, Canonical claims to create "Linux for the human beings". I partially agree with that. But I would like to know how removing the ncurses interface to locales could possibly make the system simpler. I mean: "common" users just won't care if they have 100 locales instead of 10, so it doesn't matter for them. We "advanced users" can edit plan text files, for sure, but is that a good reason to remove a convenient interface from the system?

Ubuntu really puzzles me sometimes…