Broken non-ascii chars (well, some of them)

[Bèrto ëd Sèra <berto dot d dot sera at gmail dot com>]

Hi!

I'm developing a new locale and I run into a weird problem. The
problem is limited with the locale files itself (the most evident part
being the "date" command), because all accented letters aren't
rendered properly. I prepared the files according to this guide:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/guide/locales/glibc after some
fiddling with gdm now everything works all right and I'm seeing my
localization used by my box (accented letters in .po files work
perfectly).

The escaped file in unicode codepoints is here:
http://pms.i-iter.org/graph/pms_IT

it was installed by a python script that basically executed
localedef -i pms_IT --charmap=UTF-8 /usr/share/locale/pms_IT.utf8/

Among the resulting files there is
http://pms.i-iter.org/graph/LC_TIME

If you download it and print it with cat, you'll see a weird thing: at
first you get a sequence where the accented chars are correctly
rendered, then you have a second one, in which they are broken. This
very second sequence is evidently used by date. I checked that the
codepoints where mapped correctly into the file with ghex2, and at
least the codes are those I expected, although I have no idea of what
the proper file format should be.

As an interesting addition I have to say that this locale worked
perfectly untile I recompiled glibc (and yes I did try to regenerate
the locales and do a full reinstall after that). At that point only
the command line was working, because I had no idea that gdm has a
copy of locale.alias in its own configuration directory, so it ignored
the locale. I got to recompile gnome fully in hope that it could help
in solving the problem, and indirectly it did, as it switched the
system to xdm, which used the system default locale (mine). Once I
finally saw that the trouble was limited to gdm I knew where to look
and finally spotted the problem and got it solved. Too bad that at
this point I had messed up my date.

I'm absolutely running out of ideas, so I hope someone can tell me how
and where I'm being dumb :)

Thanks
Bèrto

I'm running on gentoo
Linux gentoo 2.6.28-gentoo-r5 #30 SMP Tue May 12 12:03:52 EEST 2009
i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

my version of glibc is
sys-libs/glibc Installed versions:? 2.8_p20080602-r1 (selected use
flags: gd nls // non-selected use flags: -crosscompile_opts_headers-
only -debug -glibc-omitfp -hardened -multilib -profile -selinux -vanilla)

bertodsera@gentoo ~ $ locale
LANG=pms_IT.utf8
LC_CTYPE="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_TIME="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_PAPER="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_NAME="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="pms_IT.utf8"
LC_ALL=