Re: texinfo-7.2.90 on OpenBSD

On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 03:55:53AM +0100, [email protected] wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 10:05:58PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 10:26:54PM +0100, [email protected] wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 06:21:55PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > I don't understand the reasons but the conclusion seems to be that we
> > > > have to use this round-about way of setting the locale, which we've
> > > > come to after some amount of trial and error.
> > > 
> > > I tested something similar in Perl on OpenBSD 7.8, and it does not work.
> > > With LC_MESSAGES it did not work at all, with LC_CTYPE the switch to the
> > > locale happens, but there is no translation.  Here is the code I tested
> > > (at the beginning of _switch_messages_locale:
> > 
> > Would it be possible to check the value of POSIX::setlocale(LC_MESSAGES)
> > on OpenBSD and find if there is any way to set this to a different value?
> > 
> > The "set and retrieved" part of that implies that this should be possible.
> 
> I have tried setting environment variables LC_ALL and also calling
> POSIX::setlocale (LC_ALL, ""), as well as other mossibilities, setting
> LC_CTYPE, calling POSIX::setlocale (LC_ALL, "en_US.utf8") but a
> POSIX::setlocale(LC_MESSAGES) call (as in libintl-perl) always returns
> C.
> 
> I do not see any way to have it work.  It actually means that
> libintl-perl cannot do anything on OpenBsed 7.8, unless I missed
> something.  Maybe I could report that to the libintl-perl maintainer and
> see what he thinks?

I couldn't make it work either.  I don't know what is going on with the
POSIX::setlocale function in Perl.

I tried running a test program in Perl with the "ktrace" program and
a setlocale function didn't appear to be called.

According to the Perl documentation, setlocale may not be called:

  Starting in Perl 5.28, on multi-threaded perls compiled on systems that
  implement POSIX 2008 thread-safe locale operations, this function doesn't
  actually call the system setlocale. Instead those thread-safe operations
  are used to emulate the setlocale function, but in a thread-safe manner.

https://perldoc.perl.org/perllocale#The-setlocale-function

Elsewhere on that page, it says that "thread-safe locale operations" can
be detected by checking a variable:

  You can tell if using locales is safe on your system by looking at the
  read-only variable ${^SAFE_LOCALES}. The value is 1 if the perl is not
  threaded, or if it is using thread-safe locale operations.

On the system I am checking this on (cfarm231), this variable indeed
had the value 1.  So it seems to be an issue with Perl.  perl --version
reports the version is 5.40.1.

On the other hand, the corresponding function in C did behave as expected:

#include <locale.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int
main (void)
{
        char *locale = setlocale (LC_MESSAGES, "en_US.UTF-8");
        printf ("locale is %s\n", locale);
}

This prints "locale is en_US.UTF-8".

I also tested older versions of Texinfo and at least this problem is not
new in this release - it was a problem at least as early as the last
release, 7.2, where we called POSIX::setlocale the same way.