[KLUG Members] RedHat 8.0 UTF-8 compatibility revisited ...

[Justin Buist]

On Wed, Dec 25, 2002 at 10:09:02PM -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> After following Bruce's comments, I found out that a simple change of
> "/etc/sysconfig/i18n":
> 
> From:
>    LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
>    SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
>    SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
> 
> To:
>    LANG="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
>    SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
>    SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
> 
> Fixes all my issues with several binary-only programs (like Acrobat
> Reader).  Each variable is just a colon (:) separated set of values, and
> one only needs to add "en_US:en" to the "LANG" variable.
> 
> Maybe RedHat _should_ be doing this by default in 8.x???

I'm really curious about this for no apparent reason.  I pulled up some POSIX
spec documents at 
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xbd/envvar.html and I don't see
the SUPPORTED environment variable being a pure POSIX deal.  Admittedly I
don't even know where to look this stuff up officialy -- I just trusted that
Google would show me the most relavent document.  I also don't see the : being
mentioned as a seperator for the LANG environment variable, but then again
that could be elsewhere in the specs as it seems to apply to many stock
environment variables.  I just grabbed the source to glibc-2.2.5 and I'm
poking around at the setlocale() implementation right now thinking that might
clue me into something here, but nothing so far.

So, does anybody know the -proper- way to deal with LANG and SUPPORTED when
writing an application?  I sure don't, but have noticed a lack of most
developers (commercial and non) ignoring localization and am personaly making
an effort as of late to educate myself on how it's done properly.

I also thought it was interesting that you mention it's a probably with
binary-only programs.  My suspicion here is that perhaps they're linked
against an older version of libc, perhaps a broken one in the eyes of RH8.
Has anybody ever seen this problem with an open-sourced app?  I'd like to take
a gander at it then -- if not, could you provide some 'strace' dumps of a
broken system for me to peek at?  I don't have RH8 handy here, nor do I have a
spare box suitable for it.

Thanks!

Justin Buist