Re: possible bug in libtool w/ MinGW on Chinese locale

[Ralf Wildenhues]

[ Tim, there is a question for you below ]

Hello Pete, Xiaofan,

thanks both of you for the fine and detailed bug report.

* Pete Batard wrote on Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 06:36:23PM CET:
> When running libtool with the attached files to produce a DLL, on
> Windows Vista 32 bit Chinese (PRC) with MinGW/MSYS and with no
> locale set in the shell (i.e. LANG, LC_ALL, LC_TYPE, etc.
> undefined), the attached files fail with the following:
[...]
> *** Warning: linker path does not have real file for library -lole32.
[...]
> As soon as you set the locale in the shell, the problem disappears:
> 
> $ export LANG=en_US
> $ ./runme.sh
[...]
> libtool: link: rm -fr  .libs/libtest.a .libs/libtest.la .libs/libtest.lai
> libtool: link: gcc -shared  .libs/test.o   -lole32    -o
> .libs/libtest.dll -Wl,-
> -enable-auto-image-base -Xlinker --out-implib -Xlinker .libs/libtest.dll.a
> Creating library file: .libs/libtest.dll.a
> libtool: link: ar cru .libs/libtest.a  test.o
> libtool: link: ranlib .libs/libtest.a
> libtool: link: ( cd ".libs" && rm -f "libtest.la" && cp -p
> "../libtest.la" "libtest.la" )

> The problem also does not seem to occur with cygwin, as locale
> environment variable seem to be defined by default there.
> 
> Note that it might not be possible to reproduce the issue on non
> Chinese versions of Windows, by trying to change the default locale
> (or at least, I haven't managed to do so).
> 
> Our current workaround then is to force the "# NLS nuisances" test
> of libtool to set the locale variables always, even if none are
> currently defined.
> 
> For background information on the issue, you can consult the libusb
> mailing list archive at:
> http://old.nabble.com/Problem-compiling-with-MingW-td27762662i80.html

A couple of questions:

1) Would it also be sufficient to just
  LC_ALL=C; LANGUAGE=C; export LANGUAGE LC_ALL

or do you actually need LANG to be set?  Autoconf-generated configure
scripts set these two unconditionally, so I don't expect any problems
there.

2) If LANG needs to be set, then we may run into

  # Only set LANG and LC_ALL to C if already set.
  # These must not be set unconditionally because not all systems understand
  # e.g. LANG=C (notably SCO).

Tim, this code was from some initial revision in '97.  Do I gather
correctly that it has no relevance today, and that we should just
remove this?

Thanks,
Ralf