bug#79118: CI test failures

Hi Bruno,

Collin Funk <[email protected]> writes:

> The issue is that they return the non-C locale date. The code we use
> when --iso-8601 or --rfc-3339 is in use is the following:
>
>     if (use_c_locale)
>       setlocale (LC_TIME, "C");
>
>     bool ok = show_date (format, when, tz);
>
> I wonder if the issue is the cached_localename in
> gl_locale_name_posix_unsafe of Gnulib's lib/localename-unsafe.c. Maybe
> it causes strftime to read the old locale when setlocale (LC_TIME, "C")
> was called.
>
> Hopefully I can debug this on the cfarm machine.

Seems like I was onto something here. Unfortunately, it seems that you
need some special permissions on MacOS to use lldb, so I cannot use it
on cfarm104.

However, I think some printf debugging will work fine to demonstrate. I
created a Coreutils tarball with the following Gnulib patch:

diff --git a/lib/strftime.c b/lib/strftime.c
index 6495a6847e..750b4ccd8a 100644
--- a/lib/strftime.c
+++ b/lib/strftime.c
@@ -111,6 +111,7 @@
 #include <stddef.h>
 #include <stdlib.h>
 #include <string.h>
+#include <stdio.h>
 
 #if (defined __NetBSD__ || defined __sun) && REQUIRE_GNUISH_STRFTIME_AM_PM
 # include "localename.h"
@@ -1118,6 +1119,7 @@ my_strftime (STREAM_OR_CHAR_T *s, STRFTIME_ARG (size_t maxsize)
   if (strcmp (locale_charset (), "UTF-8") == 0)
     {
       const char *loc = gl_locale_name_unsafe (LC_TIME, "LC_TIME");
+      printf ("%s\n", loc);
       if (strlen (loc) >= 5 && !(loc[5] >= 'A' && loc[5] <= 'Z'))
         {
           if (memcmp (loc, "th_TH", 5) == 0)

Here is two example runs on GNU/Linux to demonstrate the correct
behavior:

    $ LC_ALL=am_ET.UTF-8 ./src/date
    am_ET.UTF-8
    ሰኞ፣ ሐምሌ 21 ቀን  7:12:26 ከሰዓት PDT 2017 ዓ/ም
    $ LC_ALL=am_ET.UTF-8 ./src/date --iso-8601 
    C
    2025-07-28

Then on MacOS 12.6 (cfarm104) which is the incorrect behavior:

    $ LC_ALL=am_ET.UTF-8 ./src/date
    am_ET.UTF-8
    ሰኞ ሐም 21 21:14:24 CDT 2017
    $ LC_ALL=am_ET.UTF-8 ./src/date --iso-8601
    am_ET.UTF-8
    2017-11-21

It looks like the issue here is that Apple's CoreFoundation locale
functionality only cares about LC_ALL. Since changing the code I sent my
previous message to:

    if (use_c_locale)
      setlocale (LC_ALL, "C");

    bool ok = show_date (format, when, tz);

Will emit:

   $ LC_ALL=am_ET.UTF-8 ./src/date --iso-8601 
   2025-07-28

But doing that seems unfortunate since error messages from show_date
will now be printed in English, when that is not wanted...

Collin