Re: texinfo-7.2.90 on OpenBSD

Patrice Dumas wrote:
> I had a look at the setlocale man page on this platform and there is
> this paragraph:
> 
>      On OpenBSD, the only useful value for the category is LC_CTYPE.  It sets
>      the locale used for character encoding, character classification, and
>      case conversion.  For compatibility with natural language support in
>      packages(7), all other categories -- LC_COLLATE, LC_MESSAGES,
>      LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC, and LC_TIME -- can be set and retrieved, too,
>      but their values are ignored by the OpenBSD C library.  A category of
>      LC_ALL sets the entire locale generically, which is strongly discouraged
>      for security reasons in portable programs.
> 
> So, unless I misinterpret this, it seems that LC_CTYPE should be used
> instead of LC_MESSAGES on that platform.

No, no. You can't take the OpenBSD man page regarding locales seriously
because the OpenBSD people haven't understood locales:
  * They think that because in different locales, some results are different,
    locales are dangerous and need to be discouraged.
  * While they have a setlocale() that remembers the given value — for the
    packages, as they say, — they have forgotten to implement the same thing
    in uselocale(). Making uselocale() pointless in OpenBSD.
  * setlocale (LC_ALL, value) is equivalent to
      setlocale (LC_CTYPE, value)
      && setlocale (LC_MESSAGES, value)
      && setlocale (LC_NUMERIC, value)
      && ...
    When you set only LC_CTYPE, messages will always come out untranslated,
    i.e. in English.

>       setenv_status = setenv ("LC_ALL", "en_US.UTF-8", 1)
>                       || setenv ("LANG", "en_US.UTF-8", 1);
>       locale = setlocale (LC_MESSAGES, "");

The second of these lines is redundant: If setenv ("LC_ALL", "en_US.UTF-8", 1)
fails, the only possible reason is out-of-memory, and then it's pointless to
try the same thing with "LANG".

Bruno