Re: /bin/ls formatting broken for non-C(?) locales

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 12:02:13PM +0100, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 11:42:53AM +0100, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 11:05:56AM +0300, Sergey V. Dyatko wrote:
> > > subj. http://i.imgur.com/F9QO29l.png
> > > it is on head_at_r290573:
> > > WTR:
> > > env LC_ALL=uk_UA.UTF-8 ls -la /usr/ports/databases/ or env LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8
> > > ls -la /usr/ports/databases/

> > > env LC_ALL=C ls -la /usr/ports/databases/ works fine
> > > also on old stable/10 (r286868)  as I can see 'month' field length 3 symbols 

> > Thanks for reporting, I can reproduce the issue with some other
> > locales. The thing is there seems to be no standard for abbreviated
> > length. Formerly we had a 3 character lenght for abbreviated month.

> > We now use CLDR which seems to follow the abbreviated rules from IBM:
> > "Each string must be of equal length and contain 5 characters or less"

> > There are 2 possible fixes: either always pad those in the locale
> > definition which seems wrong or modify ls so that it by itself pads
> > properly.

> > Neither posix nor ISO-14652 defines the length of the abbreviated form

> > padding in the locales themself would be wrong so I do propose to
> > pad in the ls command. And padding with 5 characters.

> For the record glibc/linux had the same problem:
> https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9859

> "fixed" in coreutils (gnu ls) the way I propose to do for us
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commit;h=612b647dd16d5abc03b295abe42d8b4a0fe660f7

Coreutils fixed it slightly better: it calculates the maximum width of
the abbreviated month names and pads to that (with a maximum of 5). In
particular, this ensures that the output does not change for locales
that have 3-character abbreviations, such as the POSIX locale. I think
this is valuable.

They also keep the list of month names from this calculation and they
say this speeds up ls noticeably compared to having strftime() expand %b
for every file.
-- 
Jilles Tjoelker