checked with glibc-2.3.2 on a Debian/sarge system. The
locale_alias and the encoding_alias tables map the
encoding from utf-8, utf8 to utf, which is not a valid
encoding, at least on this system.

LANG=de_DE.utf-8 python -c 'import locale;
locale.resetlocale()'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in ?
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/locale.py", line 391, in
resetlocale
    _setlocale(category,
_build_localename(getdefaultlocale()))
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting