AUTHORS list and the C locale on Mac OS X

[Hin-Tak Leung]

--- On Wed, 10/11/10, Ken Thomases <ken at codeweavers.com> wrote:

> From: Ken Thomases <ken at codeweavers.com>
> Subject: Re: AUTHORS list and the C locale on Mac OS X
> To: "Reece Dunn" <msclrhd at googlemail.com>
> Cc: "wine-devel" <wine-devel at winehq.org>
> Date: Wednesday, 10 November, 2010, 20:08
> On Nov 9, 2010, at 4:29 PM, Reece
> Dunn wrote:
> 
> > You could use autoconf to detect:
> >  1/  broken handling of UTF-8 characters by
> sed;
> >  2/  name of LC_ALL flag that handles UTF-8
> 
> In theory, you only need to set LC_CTYPE, not any other
> aspect of the locale.  And for that, you don't need the
> language or country.  On Mac OS X, the encoding can be
> bare, such as LC_CTYPE=UTF-8.
> 
> The Makefile used to set LANG, then commit
> 492ac292b918a3369900532e4edfadaeeba32064 changed it to
> LC_ALL.  That wasn't explained.  I assume it was
> because LANG could be superseded by LC_* variables in the
> user's environment, and that is undesirable.
> 
> Perhaps another approach would be to explicitly unset
> LC_ALL and export LC_CTYPE=UTF-8.
> 
> 
> On Nov 9, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Charles Davis wrote:
> 
> > Unfortunately, I just remembered that the name of the
> UTF-8 encoding is
> > different on Mac OS ('UTF-8') and Linux ('utf8').
> 
> Are you sure about that?  Checking on a couple of
> Linux systems here, the "locale" command reports:
> 
> $ locale
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
> ...
> 
> Hmm.  However, using a bare encoding for LC_CTYPE
> doesn't seem to fly on Linux.  Darn, so close to a
> simple fix. :(

mine (fedora x86_64) does the utf8 thing:

# locale
LANG=en_GB.utf8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.utf8"
...

so there is some truth in the reporter's assertion - what it means is that it varies between different linux'es!!!