Bug#41144: incomplete or broken locale defns cause general chaos
Package: locales
Version: 2.1.1-13
Severity: critical
Many of the locale definitions seem to have missing, undefined
fields. This wreaks havoc on a number of programs, causing them to
hang or crash or otherwise fail. A simple example:
LANG=it_IT date +%p
This will hang with most of the provided locales, not just it_IT.
Only the japanese, turkish, chinese, icelandic and most of the english
and spanish locales pass this simple test. Any which fail this test
can also cause emacs (as a random example) to hang.
I've checked with a few other people, and this seems to be pretty
consistent. I think we need to have *some* value defined for
everything that's supposed to be in a locale for all locales. Better
to have incorrect data (e.g. from C or POSIX locales) than no data,
IMO, since incorrect data won't cause things to hang....
(Feanor, ibid and Tv agree on that last point, and they're more
directly affected by this problem than I am.)
--
Chris Waters xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
or xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
http://www.dsp.net/xtifr | this .signature file.
Reply to: