[arch-general] Including compiled C.UTF-8 locale by default in glibc package? Inbox

[Greg Minshall]

Ralph,

> Or worse, it may continue to run but cause corruption of data.

thanks for weighing in.  i sympathize with (and find appealing) your
position.

but, i think this may be a trade-off between usability and correctness.
(we more often talk about the trade-off between usability and security.)
if so, there may be no "absolutely right" answer to how to deal with it.

i think it used to be the case that many unix/linux users didn't have
their locale stuff very straight.  i don't know the extent to which that
is still true.

i think it reasonable to expect programmers to figure out how to do
things, set things up, "right".  (and, of course, that's what you're
trying to suggest!).

but, "end users" may be lost, and expecting them to do get things
configured correctly before providing them service may be unrealistic.
(a risk -- but, to the users?  to us developers? --- is that they get
so frustrated they give up.)

and, in fact, the services themselves -- like sed(1) and grep(1) -- may
be tools a user might need to use in order to figure things out. [*]

my take would be, printing a stern warning to stderr is a reasonable
compromise.  but, ytmv, as it were.

it was also very helpful for me in this exchange to learn that if the
call to, e.g., `setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")` fails, *that* is when the error
message should appear.  and, also the fact that "C" locale will "always"
be there, so there's no reason to try doing a `setlocale()` to it as a
fall back.  my current code does try to fall back on `C.UTF-8`:

----
    if (!setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Warning: Can't set the specified locale! "
                "Check LANG, LC_CTYPE, LC_ALL.\n");
#if defined(STOP_IF_NO_LOCALE)
        exit(RET_LOCALE);
#else /* defined(STOP_IF_NO_LOCALE) */
        /* make an attempt to activate C.UTF-8, if available, but
         * ignore any errors. */
        setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "C.UTF-8");
#endif /* defined(STOP_IF_NO_LOCALE) */
    }
----

cheers, Greg

[*] fwiw, sed and grep both seem to run even if they are unable to deal
with an unsupported locale.

ps--

> Looking at the URL, it doesn't suggest an attempt to fall back to the
> C locale.
> 
> Neither does the web page suggest the program continue, but instead exit
> with an error status.

sorry, the URL was acknowledging where i got the general structure; as
The Author says, "Any remaining errors are, of course, my
responsibility." :)