Systems with invalid locales

[Stéphane Graber]

On 06/04/2013 06:33 AM, Adam Conrad wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 04:18:40AM -0600, Adam Conrad wrote:
>>
>> I wonder if it might be high time to discuss slapping C.UTF-8 in the
>> default locale in pretty much every minimal installation scenario we
>> can think of (obviously, still overriding in more complex installers
>> that allow a user to choose a properly local locale).
> 
> And on a vague tangent from that, it might also be getting close to a
> point where we should discuss switching buildds to C.UTF-8 too (they
> currently force C).  My gut feeling is that this shouldn't have much
> effect, with the following assumptions:
> 
> 1) Most packages and testsuites shouldn't care what locale they're
>    run in in the first place (but it doesn't seem to make sense to
>    test in a locale almost no one uses in production, while a UTF-8
>    locale will at least trip a few curious issues real people see)
> 
> 2) Most packages that do require being in C for their builds or for
>    their testsuite probably already force this, because maintainers
>    have been working in fancy locales for years now, and they've
>    had to force C where needed to make things work outside chroots.
> 
> Pretty sure we *would* run into some packages (especially older ones)
> that would fail in a UTF-8 locale, but I think the general benefit of
> building in a locale more similar to 99% of people's runtime locales
> would be a net win, even if we have to fix builds and testsuites to
> cope.
> 
> Thoughts?

+1

I stopped counting the number of packages I had to fix because they blew
up mid-build while trying to parse their own changelog and exploded on
my name, so I'd be very happy to finally have a UTF-8 locale on our buildds.

I'd also be very surprised if we had actual cases where C.UTF-8 gives a
different result than C. Unless some tests actually attempt to print
non-ASCII characters under C, but that'd be a pretty weird test to have.

So I think it's a change worth doing and any issue we find will clearly
be bugs that should simply get fixed.

-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com

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