Couldn’t Find a Valid ICU Package

As I ran my .NET 5 application on Linux, I was greeted with the following error:

Exception  Copy
Process terminated. Couldn't find a valid ICU package installed on the system. Set the configuration flag System.Globalization.Invariant to true if you want to run with no globalization support.
   at System.Environment.FailFast(System.String)
   at System.Globalization.GlobalizationMode.GetGlobalizationInvariantMode()
   at System.Globalization.GlobalizationMode..cctor()
   at System.Globalization.CultureData.CreateCultureWithInvariantData()
   at System.Globalization.CultureData.get_Invariant()
   at System.Globalization.CultureInfo..cctor()
   at System.Globalization.CultureInfo.get_CurrentCulture()
   at System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo.get_CurrentInfo()
...
Aborted (core dumped)

Underlying cause was my ancient Red Hat installation missing localization support and the easy way to deal with it is was to simply set DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT environment variable. On command line that would look something like this:

Terminal  Copy
DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=1 ./myprogram

However, if we really don't need globalization support, setting it directly in .csproj might be better:

.csproj  Copy
  <PropertyGroup>
    <InvariantGlobalization>true</InvariantGlobalization>
  </PropertyGroup>