bug#79714: env: always adds __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING var on macOS since v9.8

On 29/10/2025 03:51, Collin Funk wrote:
> Collin Funk <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>> My intuition is that calling the Core Foundation locale functions will
>> cause that environment variable to be set along with creating that file.
>>
>> Can you share the ./configure options you used? Or did you download
>> Coreutils through Homebrew? That would help lead me in the right
>> direction, I think.
> 
> Actually the environment variable is set in any program that is linked
> against Core Foundation. Regardless of whether you call functions from
> it or not. See the following test program:
> 
>      $ cat main.c
>      #include <stdio.h>
>      #include <stdlib.h>
>      int
>      main (void)
>      {
>        char *p = getenv ("__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING");
>        printf ("%s\n", p ? p : "(null)");
>        return EXIT_SUCCESS;
>      }
>      $ ./a.out
>      (null)
>      $ cc main.c -Wl,-framework -Wl,CoreFoundation
>      $ ./a.out
>      0xF23D:0:0
> 
> I believe Core Foundation is needed for our setlocale substitute on
> MacOS.

Oh interesting.
That would be a reason to not link env(1) against it.
In fact only 6 commands require the localename-unsafe dependency:  date, du through show-date() (fprintftime), and
   ls, pr, stat, uptime through strftime().
So I'll adjust things to only link those against CoreFoundation.

cheers,
Padraig