[tlug] Why change a linux server's locale?

[マスターズ・イアン <ian@example.com>]

Hi folks

I'm a sys admin in Osaka, trying to keep the attention of our company's programmers on Security, at least some of the time. Wish me luck with that!

During the time I've been working in Japan (over 15 years), almost exclusively in Linux, I've come across many attempts to "push" Linux into various corners it didn't want to go. Many of these corners concern Japanese language encodings such as euc and sjis. (a quick 'locale -a|grep ja' on CentOS7 gives: ja_JP, ja_JP.eucjp,
ja_JP.ujis, ja_JP.utf8, japanese and japanese.euc)

It's never been a huge problem, as far as I can remember, but I really wonder why it's necessary, given that:
1. ja_JP.UTF-8 supports Japanese completely, and
2. Most things that go on inside a database are unaffected by the OS's locale

So, my questions are ...
1. Do you know of any reason I should be worried about the fact that our development server's locale is ja_JP.UTF-8 but the customer's is ja_JP.sjis (which isn't even supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux)?
2. When have you found it absolutely imperative to have a Linux server with sjis locale?

Thanks. Peas.

ian