It was in fact intentionally broken to find out where removing single-byte locales hurts our users most.
We have a hackathon coming up with devs committed to making UTF-8 work in more base utilities. If that works out, and the most sore points of latin1/koi-8/etc users have been adequately addressed, 5.9 will ship with only the UTF-8 locale (and of course the default "C" locale -- ASCII).
If this approach turns out to be wrong because we cannot get regressions fixed, 5.9 will ship like 5.7 and 5.8 (with UTF-8 and single byte locales).
That locale pseudo-exists. It's called "don't call the evil setlocale function, write in C90 as much as possible, do your own UTF-8 encoding and decoding, and implement the exact default date format you want with your own strftime string or whatever."
We have a hackathon coming up with devs committed to making UTF-8 work in more base utilities. If that works out, and the most sore points of latin1/koi-8/etc users have been adequately addressed, 5.9 will ship with only the UTF-8 locale (and of course the default "C" locale -- ASCII).
If this approach turns out to be wrong because we cannot get regressions fixed, 5.9 will ship like 5.7 and 5.8 (with UTF-8 and single byte locales).