Re: texinfo-6.8: Test failing

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Jul 05, 2021 at 10:57:21AM +0100, Chris Clayton wrote:
> > This isn't what I expected as you have a locale "en_US.utf8" which I
> > understand is the same thing as "en_US.UTF-8", which is one of the
> > locales tried in 'gdt' in tp/Texinfo/Report.pm.
> 
> That's not a surprise to me. My system was created by me using the Linux From 
> Scratch guidance.
> I freely admit that I was all at sea when it came to which locales I was 
> likely to need, so I tried this, that and
> t'other and when I found a setup that seemed to suffice, I quit while I was 
> ahead.
> 
> That was years ago and I've learned alot in that time. However, "good enough 
> is good enough" and "if it ain't broke,
> don't fix it" where maxims I applied throughout most of my 30+ year career in 
> IT. Now it's broke, so I've regenerated
> the locale stuff on my system to include en_US.UTF-8 and the texinfo-6.8 now 
> completes without error.

That is useful to know but also frustrating as it implies there is a
difference between en_US.utf8 and en_US.UTF-8 and I don't know what that
is.

I've got en_US.utf8 on my system when I run "locale -a" but that test
passed for me.  All I can think is that something might have gone wrong
when you installed the locales.

> So it's close to a case of PEBKAC. It might, howver, be an idea for the test 
> to be skipped if none of the locales it
> requires to succeed are present.
> 
> Thanks for your help.

Yes I agree, if we can't make the test pass in the case that no locales
are installed.

It's a frustrating problem as we aren't using the locale information for
the user, we are using it for a document that is being produced that could
be in a different language.  Whatever locales the user has installed should
be irrelevant.  Some time I will look over the gettext documentation again
and try to see if there is a better way of doing this.

A quick fix would be to downgrade the bundled libintl-perl to the version
used for Texinfo 6.7 but that would remove some other fixes and improvements.