[arch-dev-public] Issues with non-ASCII path names in packages

Allan McRae allan at archlinux.org
Fri Oct 28 19:08:31 EDT 2011


On 29/10/11 02:23, Pierre Schmitz wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> we found some issues with libarchive and some file names when using the
> C locale. For example try
>      $ bsdtar tf ca-certificates-20111025-1-any.pkg.tar.xz (from
> testing)
> The result will be "bsdtar: Pathname in pax header can't be converted
> to current locale." Fun fact: The package was created using the C
> locale. Due to this pacman will refuse to install this package when
> using the C locale which is used e.g. by our build tools.

Has anyone tested whether the package is created correctly using the 
previous version of libarchive?  The previous ca-certificates package 
has non-ASCII filenames in it too and worked fine, so I would suspect 
this is an issue with the current libarchive.

> Ignoring the question if we should avoid packaging such file names we
> might have a bigger problem here: our C locale does not work well with
> unicode names. To solve such issues our friends at Debian introduced a
> new C.UTF-8 locale. This might be a better alternative than forcing e.g.
> en_US.UTF-8 as default locale which might have other consequences;
> different sorting behavior for example. Some information can be found at
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=609306 and
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522776

I usually refuse to add extra locales to glibc beyond that included 
upstream.  Maintaining extra locales is a massive burden and I do not 
want to open the door for requests to add (e.g.) all the locales Debian 
does...

Allan


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