Test locales (was: Re: Encoding customization variable names)

[Jacob Bachmeyer]

Gavin Smith wrote:
> Another issue (I can't remember if I emailed you before about this) is
> the locale settings to run the test suites. You changed it from "C" to
> "C.UTF-8", but the latter encoding doesn't exist everywhere. I changed
> it to "en_US.UTF-8" (see ChangeLog entries on 2022-04-14) but this
> won't exist everywhere either. Perhaps we should find some way of
> keeping the test suite under the "C" locale, perhaps disabling or
> conditionalizing tests that require a UTF-8 locale.
>   

I seem to recall that locale is selected using environment variables and 
POSIX only requires and specifies the "C" locale.  Surely the test 
harness could set up the environment such that tests not related to 
locale handling are always run under the "C" locale (and not UTF-8 
either -- those tests should be ASCII-only since POSIX only requires 
ASCII to be supported)?  Either the configure script or the test harness 
itself could search for an acceptable UTF-8 locale and skip the tests 
that use UTF-8 if one is not found on the system.


-- Jacob