Character conversion incompatibility between RedHat 7.2 and 9

[Hester van Rooyen]

Dear GNU Development Team

We are trying to port a software system from RedHat 7.2 to RedHat 9, and 
encountered an apparent gcc/glibc incompatibility ito character conversion 
functions. Some of these applications are binaries in the form of libraries 
bought from third party suppliers, having calls to C library character 
conversion functions like toupper and tolower. When attempting to link with 
these libraries on RedHat 9, error messages like 'Undefined reference to 
__ctype_upper' are generated. Compiling with the same Makefile works 
correctly under both RedHat 7.2 and Redhat 8.0.

I include a simple sample program in the attached file to illustrate the 
problem. The README file in the attachment lists the exact revisions used.

The problem seems related to Unicode - however, I have tried to unset the 
LANG variable, even set the C locale in the source code, but that made no 
difference.

Please advise as to whether this was intentional - the glibc version on 
both RedHat 7.2 and RedHat 9 is libc.so.6, which, to my knowledge, means 
that the interface is unchanged and the port should work.

If there is a simple workaround, advice will be appreciated.

Thank you

Hester van Rooyen
GEOsystems

toupper.tgz
Description: application/compressed