Re: Please do not install a charset.alias file under Mac OS X

[Eric Blake]

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According to Vincent Lefevre on 11/14/2008 7:12 PM:

Hello Vincent, and thanks for the report.

> A number of utilities, including bison, m4 and findutils, install a
> charset.alias file under Mac OS X, and this breaks the locale system
> (any locale is regarded as UTF-8) [*]. The problem has been around
> for a couple of years.

You are better off filing this report against gettext, which is the source
of this file, and/or gnulib, which ships the latest version of this file
even in packages (such as m4) that have not yet undergone the I18n
conversion to use gettext.  Feel free to drop everything besides
bug-gnulib and bug-gnu-gettext when replying.

At any rate, the charsets.alias file has been shipped by gettext and any
project that uses gettext for years, in order to accomplish message
translation.  If this file interferes with correct locale behavior, then
it is a bug that should be fixed at the gettext source, rather than
writing a bug report against every package that happens to use gettext or
gnulib, but where the subsidiary packages have no control over the problem.

> 
> Moreover, even if it didn't break anything, the file is overwritten
> when another such software is installed.

The installation process is supposed to modify, not overwrite, the
charset.alias file to append the names of additional packages that are
using it.

> 
> [*]
>   http://trac.macports.org/ticket/11474
>   http://trac.macports.org/ticket/11968
>   http://trac.macports.org/ticket/17084
> 

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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