Re: texinfo 6.1, 6.3: warning messages in no-locale setups

[Gavin Smith]

On 25 January 2017 at 05:03, Michael Deutschmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> On my system, a vanilla build of texinfo 6.3 frequently outputs a message:
>
> sh: 1: locale: not found
> Couldn't set UTF-8 character type in locale.
>
> In turn, this causes a dozen "make check" tests to FAIL.

You didn't say which tests failed but I suspect they are the ones
under tp/tests which compare the output on stderr from the program.
>
> The problem is one chunk of code that badly wants to find and change to a
> locale with the wanted character set.  This is futile on my system as I
> am running uClibc with locales compiled out.  There is no locale utility
> and setlocale() is a constant function.
>
> Oddly nothing seems to actually need to modify the locale.  If I
> simply insert a "return 0;" in "xspara.c" to prevent the message, all
> "make check" tests succeed.

This is because if 'xspara_init' fails the code in xspara.c isn't
used, and Perl code is used instead.

It would be easy to fix by deleting the error message, but I'm not
sure if the program should warn that it wants to use a UTF-8 locale.

The reason it wants to use a UTF-8 locale is so that it can use
functions like mbrtowc and iswspace to process UTF-8 input. Is there
any other way to process UTF-8 in C if you have no locales available
on your system?

> This actually started with texinfo-6.1.
>

Yes, that is to be expected.