Re: Bug#186140: Bug#206210: diff: does not comply with LSB 1.3 (fwd)

[Stefan Gybas <sgybas@debian.org>]

Michael Stone wrote:

> *I don't care.* Tell me what part of the standard is at issue. As I

LSB 1.3 has a list of related standards at 
http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/refspecs/LSB_1.3.0/gLSB/gLSB/rstandards.html 
and the test suite failures arise from violations of one of the related 
standards, in this case LI18NUX 2000 (OpenI18n) Level 1 as you can see 
from the test names.

> already said, the goal is LSB compliance, not test suite compliance.

LSB compliance is certified by running the test suite. So if Debian 
passes the test suite it is LSB compliant. If one or more tests fail, it 
is not.

> That is the *first time* the term "OpenI18N" came up. Keep coming up
> with little details like that and a specific section reference and you
> might get somewhere.

coreutils violates section 4 (d) of the OpenI18n specification at 
http://www.openi18n.org/docs/html/LI18NUX-2000-amd4.htm, which in turn 
refers to the Single UNIX Specification version 2, section "Commands and 
Utilities" V5. You can view and download SUS version 3 (which is 
compatible with SUS v2 and will be the base for LSB 2.0) after 
registering at http://www.unix.org/version3/online.html. You can read 
there in section "Base Definitions, Character Set":

--- cut here ---

C Language Wide-Character Codes

In the shell, the standard utilities are written so that the encodings 
of characters are described by the locale's LC_CTYPE definition [...] 
and there is no differentiation between characters consisting of single 
octets (8-bit bytes) or multiple bytes. [...]

--- cut here ---

coreutils apparently violates this since some utilities can't cope with 
multi-byte characters. There's a section in the SUS v3 called "Shell & 
Utilities, Utilities" that specifies for each command which environment 
variables it must respect. For example, you can read for sort:

--- cut here ---

LC_CTYPE:

Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of 
text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to 
multi-byte characters in arguments and input files) and the behavior of 
character classification for the -b, -d, -f, -i, and -n options."

--- cut here ---

Hope this helps and you don't want me to look up all the section numbers 
for all commands that don't pass the test suite. :-)


Stefan