[CentOS] Yum on CentOS 8: Failed to set locale, defaulting to C

Hi,

I'm currently fiddling with CentOS 8.0 on a sandbox server in order to get acquainted with its various quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Here's the first curious detail I noticed.

I used the CentOS installer in french (since I live in France), but I like my server systems to default to english. (If you've ever read one of these funny "frengrish" SELinux alerts, you'll understand why. Anyway.)

After the installation, I ran this:

# localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF8

So here's what I have actually on my minimal system:

$ localectl System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF8 VC Keymap: ch-fr X11 Layout: ch X11 Variant: fr

But my initial user still has system messages in french, so I added this to his ~/.bashrc:

# LANG LANG=en_US.UTF8 export LANG

I logged out and logged back in and tried the 'yum check-update' command, which normally doesn't require root privileges. And here's what I get:

$ yum check-update Failed to set locale, defaulting to C Last metadata expiration check: 0:17:42 ago on Mon Dec 16 14:04:39 2019.

Any idea on how to make Yum behave here?

Cheers,

Niki