Bug#129294: gcc-2.95: cannot read translated messages
Package: gcc-2.95
Version: 1:2.95.4-1
Severity: important
Translated messages of gcc-2.95/cpp-2.95/g++-2.95/g77-2.95 is not
displayed well. All non-ASCII characters are replaced with "?"
(question mark).
For example,
$ LANG=C gcc-2.95 foobar
gcc-2.95: foobar: No such file or directory
gcc-2.95: No input files
$ LANG=fr_FR gcc-2.95 foobar
gcc-2.95: foobar: Aucun fichier ou r?pertoire de ce type
gcc-2.95: No input files
$ LANG=ja_JP.eucJP gcc-2.95 foobar
gcc-2.95: foobar: ??????????????????????
gcc-2.95: No input files
$ LANG=zh_TW.Big5 gcc-2.95 foobar
gcc-2.95: foobar: ?????????
gcc-2.95: No input files
Thus, this is an important bug for non-Latin-script people
such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Greek, and so on.
(Russian and Greek people seem not to suffer this problem
because gcc-2.95 doesn't have translated messages in Russian
and Greek).
Here is an analysis of this problem.
gcc-2.95 calls setlocale(LC_MESSAGES,"") to enable translated
messages. However, gcc-2.95 doesn't configure LC_CTYPE locale
which means that gcc-2.95 will use ASCII character set. The
result is that all non-ASCII characters are judged not to be
able to be displayed and replaced by question marks.
One method to solve this problem is to replace LC_MESSAGES to
LC_ALL. However, since there are many standard C functions
which are affected by locale, we need to check if the setting
of LC_ALL has some side-effects or not. Other easier (but
not better) way is to disable translation.
Since we will have to prepare Woody's release soon, I think
the best way is to disable translation just now tempolarily
and then start the investigation of this problem.
GOTO Masanoti <gotom@debian.org> has fixed the same problem
for several packages and is familiar with this problem.
Please ask him.
Note that this problem is fixed in gcc-3.0 but I think
gcc-2.95 is important because it is the main C compiler
for Woody.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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