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

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>>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

You might want to look at the GNOME internationlization libraries as a
reference.  Pango for instance handles internationalized text on the behalf of
applications.

>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.

I've never looked inside glibc before.

>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.

The proper way to do it, IMHO, is to build the application in an environment
that abstracts it for you (i.e. GNOME2).  Then really smart people who actually
understand the whole mess can deal with it for you.  But of course, to some
people that's "bloat".

>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.

Quite possibly.  And some have libraries statically linked into themselves
because they don't know how to create a decent RPM package.

>Has anybody ever seen this problem with an open-sourced app?  

No.

>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'll strace broken acrobat at lunch if no one else does it first.

>I don't have RH8 handy here, nor do I have
>a spare box suitable for it.

VMware!