Re: Guile 2.2.4 warnings

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi,

Tommi Höynälänmaa <address@hidden> writes:

> I just installed Guile 2.2.4 to a chroot sid (Debian)
> environment. Guile gives the following warnings on startup:
>
> ---cut here---
>
> guile: warning: failed to install locale
> warning: failed to install locale: Invalid argument
>
> ---cut here---

This indicates that setlocale(3) failed to set the locale specified by
your environment variable settings (LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, etc),
probably because the associated locale data is not installed in the
chroot.

> Are these something important?

This is an area where my knowledge is relatively weak, but I guess the
implications of failing to set the locale include:

* ASCII encoding will likely be used by default by Guile, e.g. for file
  and terminal I/O, interpretation of command-line arguments and
  environment variables, and interpretation of file names on disk.
  Normally, your locale encoding (probably UTF-8) would be used by
  default for these purposes.

* Certain operations such as locale-aware string comparisons, formatting
  of dates, numbers, monetary amounts, etc, would normally be affected
  by your locale setting.  If the locale cannot be set, I guess it will
  use the default behaviors, primarily based on US English.

If only ASCII characters are used, and if you don't mind the US English
locale conventions being used, it probably doesn't matter.

      Mark