Re: Building Bison 3.7 with musl (was Re: portability issues with unicodeio)

[CCing bug-gnulib]

Rich Felker wrote:
> I don't think the '*' has anything to do with it being a bullet
> character. It's just the implementation-defined replacement character
> musl's iconv uses.

Correct.

> I would guess the code in bison and coreutils printf is assuming the
> non-conforming glibc behavior for iconv of returning an error if a
> character from the input is not exactly representable in the output,
> rather than making replacements and returning the number of inexact
> conversions made.

Yes and no. The code is not making assumptions about a particular iconv()
implementation. But it needs to distinguish two categories of replacements
done by iconv():
  - those that are harmless (for example when replacing a Unicode TAG
    character U+E00xx with an empty output),
  - those that are better not presented to the user, if the programmer has
    specified a fallback (for example, replacing all non-ASCII characters
    with NUL, '?', or '*').

The standards don't help in making the distinction.

Therefore whether you consider said glibc and libiconv behaviour as
"non-conforming" or not is irrelevant.

I have now adjusted the code to handle musl libc better.

Bruno