Re: login.conf --> UTF-8

On Thu, 3 Apr 2014, Steve Wills wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 03:56:35PM -0700, Sean Bruno wrote:
>> On Wed, 2014-04-02 at 18:06 -0400, Garrett Wollman wrote:
>>> In article <1396457629.2280.2.camel_at_powernoodle.corp.yahoo.com>,
>>> sbruno_at_freebsd.org writes:
>>>
>>>> I'd like to make this change to login.conf for default installs.
>>>>
>>>> This removes some amount of hackery in the ports system that is working
>>>> around our lack of UTF-8 in the base.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure what the connection is here.  Surely the ports system
>>> runs with the locale of the user running "make" (which in my case is
>>> going to be "C").  Any port that requires a specific locale to build
>>> properly needs to be setting that locale explicitly.
>>>
>
> You'd think so, but that's not what's happening. What's happening is the
> software builds as long as the locale isn't C. Hence, ugly hacks like this:
>
> http://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/Mk/bsd.ruby.mk?annotate=348863#l257
>
> Why? Because the people writing it have never encountered a system where LANG
> isn't set or is set to C. Yes, it's a bug in their software. No, they never
> have and never will encounter it. Because every other operating system sets
> LANG to whatever the user specifies. And so they have no interest in fixing it,
> because neither they nor any one they know will ever encounter it, and even if
> you report it to them they will tell you it's a bug in your system for not
> having LANG specified. And I have no interest in patching it hundreds of
> times.
>
> And this is just one example. There are others, I think, that aren't ruby
> related at all.

The first thing I do when I get a Linux system is set LANG to C.
I hate all the colorizations and incorrect ordering from ls when
LANG isn't C.  So you are saying, that ports will be broken when
I set LANG back to C again?

>> I have been informed by folks that this change I suggest would help in
>> the case of ports having to declare UTF-8 support explicitly or
>> something. I'm hand-wavy on the details and ignorant of the hacks in
>> place.  I only know that I've been *told* this.
>
> I think we should join the club of asking the user, but that's more work and
> until then having a reasonable default and having people change it seems sane.

A default is fine, but saying that ports will be broken when not
using the default is not fine.  This is LANG, not a gcc/clang
machine-specific optimization that someone has set to get an
extra 0.001% improvement, but happens to break the compiler for
some ports.

-- 
DE