Catastrophic error: could not set locale "" to allow processing of multibyte characters

[avapirev]

Hi, several software (already), e.g., SCOTCH 6.1.0 won't compile with Intel/iimpi 2021a with the following error:

"Catastrophic error: could not set locale "" to allow processing of multibyte characters"

Setting up the locale as suggested elsewhere , e.g., with preconfigopts or similar won't work either.

Any comments are appreciated.
EB 4.4.0

[boegel]

@avapirev Sorry for not picking up on this earlier. Can you share some more information about your setup? Which OS, EasyBuild configuration, etc.? Can you share the output of eb --show-config and eb --show-system-info?

It seems like this may be caused by your locale settings, what values are set for related environment variables like $LC_ALL, $LANG, etc. in the shell session you're using?

[avapirev]

eb --show-config and eb --show-system-info
System information (login1):

• OS:
  -> name: centos linux
  -> type: Linux
  -> version: 7.6.1810
  -> platform name: x86_64-unknown-linux

• CPU:
  -> vendor: Intel
  -> architecture: x86_64
  -> family: Intel
  -> arch name: UNKNOWN (archspec is not installed?)
  -> model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v4 @ 2.40GHz
  -> speed: 2401.0
  -> cores: 56
  -> features: 3dnowprefetch,abm,acpi,adx,aes,aperfmperf,apic,arat,arch_perfmon,avx,avx2,bmi1,bmi2,bts,cat_l3,cdp_l3,clflush,cmov,constant_tsc,cqm,cqm_llc,cqm_mbm_local,cqm_mbm_total,cqm_occup_llc,cx16,cx8,dca,de,ds_cpl,dtes64,dtherm,dts,eagerfpu,epb,ept,erms,est,f16c,flexpriority,fma,fpu,fsgsbase,fxsr,hle,ht,ida,intel_ppin,intel_pt,invpcid,lahf_lm,lm,mca,mce,mmx,monitor,movbe,msr,mtrr,nonstop_tsc,nopl,nx,pae,pat,pbe,pcid,pclmulqdq,pdcm,pdpe1gb,pebs,pge,pln,pni,popcnt,pse,pse36,pts,rdrand,rdseed,rdt_a,rdtscp,rep_good,rtm,sdbg,sep,smep,smx,ss,sse,sse2,sse4_1,sse4_2,ssse3,syscall,tm,tm2,tpr_shadow,tsc,tsc_adjust,vme,vmx,vnmi,vpid,x2apic,xsave,xsaveopt,xtopology,xtpr

• software:
  -> glibc version: 2.17
  -> Python binary: /usr/bin/python2
  -> Python version: 2.7.5

[boegel]

@avapirev What about environment variables like $LANG and $LC_ALL, which control locale settings?

[avapirev]

None of those has any effect, no matter where and how I specify/export them, be that in the easyconfig, or somewhere else. The error specific to Intel compilers.