Re: gettext failing msgconv-3 and lang-c++

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

Paul E Reimer wrote:
> > [19:07 reimer@CSI358562 tmp] cc -liconv -o foo foo.c
> > [19:07 reimer@CSI358562 tmp] ./foo
> > _LIBICONV_VERSION = 0x10b
> > no conversion needed: ret=0, input consumed: 6/6, output produced: 6/6
> > entire string: ret=0, input consumed: 5/5, output produced: 6/6
> > carefully: ret=0, input consumed: 1/1, output produced: 2/2

> The libiconv linked to is the native MacOS/Xcode library.

Thanks for these results. It is bad enough that Apple ships a buggy iconv
implementation (the last two lines should contain 'ret=1' instead of 'ret=0').
But it's even worse that they pretend that it is derived from GNU libiconv
1.11, when in fact it is derived from Citrus/FreeBSD's iconv.

Fortunately it looks like the bug has already been fixed [1], and the
test program will likely print

_LIBICONV_VERSION = 0x10b
no conversion needed: ret=0, input consumed: 6/6, output produced: 6/6
entire string: ret=-1, input consumed: 0/0, output produced: 0/0
carefully: ret=-1, input consumed: 0/0, output produced: 0/0

Since a workaround for this problem would be quite complex (due to the
need to verify the roundtripping of each converted character), and since
Apple tends to force new releases onto its users quite rapidly, I won't
add a workaround.

Bruno

[1] https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/libiconv