Re: setlocale not that ok...

On Jun 28, 2010, at 9:51 AM, Frediano Ziglio wrote:

> Hi,
>  I think that calling setlocale in a library with locale != NULL is
> mainly a bad idea. Doing setlocale change global settings that should
> be done by the application not by a library. Setting locale changes
> subtle things like sprintf witch application should be prepared to
> handle.
>
> I think we should remove setlocale(LC_ALL, "") in src/tds/mem.c and
> src/tds/locale.c. Applications like tsql, bsql and similars should
> call setlocale by themselves.

I think I understand the argument.  The counter-argument is that there  
is no other portoble way to interrogate the locale except by calling  
setlocale(LC_ALL, "").  The alternative to not calling it in the  
library is that any application that also does not call it will be  
getting the "C" locale, which means forcing US-ASCII as the client  
character set for any application that doesn't have its own  
setlocale(LC_ALL, "") call.

We can control what happens in src/apps, but my impression is that  
most people using FreeTDS are using language bindings or an ODBC  
driver manager and wouldn't know how to set the locale (or maybe  
wouldn't have a mechanism for doing so) even if they knew something a  
couple of layers down needed it.

Maybe we should give up on trying to get the local character set and  
just use ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 unless explicitly overridden.  That might  
be less dreadful than having US-ASCII as the default.  I don't  
honestly know what the right thing to do is.

________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[email protected]

"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
  difficult than getting in."
                  Brad Leithauser