gnupg-1.0.2 patch: LC_CTYPE needs to be imported

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS]

I'd forgotten I was on this list, it has been so quiet.

I expect the glibc people can give you a more authoritative answer,
but here's my opinion anyway.

Daniel Resare <noa@metamatrix.se>:

> 1) Ask the glibc maintainers kindly not to let the LC_CTYPE
>    affect console output. That behaviour is IMHO unobvious and
>    should be considered an extention so large that a new LC_
>    category could be invented for the purpose.

I assume that what's happening is that gettext is converting messages
into the locale charset in order to display them. This behaviour is
correct: if you have German messages stored in ISO-8859-1 and the
locale charset is UTF-8, or vice versa, then you have to convert the
messages before displaying them. If the locale charset is US-ASCII
then the conversion is non-reversible. (What's it doing in fact? Does
it change Ä to AE?)

By the way, I think there's no guarantee that the charset of the
portable "C" locale is US-ASCII. Today it usually is, but in the
future it might more often be UTF-8.

It seems to me quite reasonable that the locale charset depends on
LC_CTYPE. You couldn't really have the behaviour of isalpha() being
independent of the locale charset.

> 2) wrap all calls to the ctype.h functions (isalpha() and friends
>    in setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "C")) (some grep'ing shows 56 occurances)

Yuck.

> 3) review all uses of the ctype.h functions and perhaps use the
>    isascii() function instead where appliciable (according to
>    the manpage isascii() is a BSD and SVID extension and should
>    be quite widely available)
> 
> 4) write platform indipendent replacements of the used ctype.h
>    functions that check against the US-ASCII charset. (Shouldn't
>    be difficult)

To me, these solutions look best. You could use a configure test to
choose between them. I assume that either way you're assuming that the
locale charset is compatible with US-ASCII, so GnuPG won't work in an
EBCDIC locale, but who cares.

Edmund