Re: LSB status of sarge?
On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 02:14:28PM -0500, you wrote:
We could, of course, fix the patch. :-)
Go for it. I don't see a lot of people lining up.
Which brings me to the question: what problems do you have with the
current patches?
I don't really want to rehash all that in this forum. Basically the
major objection was that the code basically did
if(multibyte)
one version of utility
else
other version of utility
which is an unmaintable mess. My other objection was that the patches
didn't address every code path which might see multibyte user input or
output, only certain paths. My impression is that once you start down
the multibyte road you basically need to look carefully at anything in
the code that uses a string, and the patches weren't doing that--they
were only fixing a couple of things that got dinged in the LSB test
suite. E.g., what happens if there's a multibyte string in a utmp file?
Should who(1) output still line up? Do we handle properly handle
multibyte input strings which contain single byte escape characters in
things like printf, echo, and date? It might be that these are
non-issues (I don't know, I only do english :) But I haven't seen a
justification of why something presented as "the coreutils multibyte
patch" is really "the" coreutils multibyte patch.
The larger meta-issue is that I'm not particularly interested in
maintaining a huge patch that is wildly divergent from upstream. I'd
prefer to see the openwhatevernumber people convince the coreutils
upstream that they've got something decent. If they even had something
that upstream would bless as being on the right track I'd consider doing
some kind of testing--but at this point AFAIK the patch is a
non-starter.
Mike Stone
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