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

[Michael Deutschmann]

(Not trimming because of the delay between this response and the original 
discussion):
On Sun, 29 Jan 2017, you wrote:
> 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.
> >
> > 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.
> 
> I've deleted the error message "Couldn't set UTF-8 character type in
> locale." because it's easy to do so. I think the tests will still fail
> on your system with the error message from "sh" ("locale: not found")
> because I think that popen doesn't do anything with standard error. I
> haven't researched how to fix this; suggestions welcome.
>
> Presumably Perl has its own UTF-8 support and doesn't need to use that
> of libc, so the fallback module can still work correctly.

Sorry it took so long for me to get back to you...

I think the proper way to handle this is to check for the existence of a
"locale" command-line utitity at *configure* time.

The utility peeks behind the C library's abstraction barrier, so if
present it is going to be in the same "package" as the C library.  So it
is unlikely "locale" could be absent while compiling texinfo but present
later, or vice versa.

---- Michael Deutschmann <address@hidden>