Locales and Programs parsing other's output
It appears that some programs in our distribution (see logs for bug
#17361 or #19166 for known examples) are trying to parse other's
output, without ensuring a specific locale.
Such a behaviour can cause obscure failures (eg. dpkg-parsechangelog
in #17361), or even erroneous output (the 'isnative' function in
dh_lib, using dpkg-parsechangelog in the same bug, or lintian in
#19166).
As many programmers not using a locale are not aware of these
problems, it seems important to me to add a paragraph in the Policy,
demanding that any program whose output is being parsed should be run
in an environment where LC_ACC is set to a fixed value,
preferably "C", or all locale-influent variables (see the output of
"locale") are unset.
IMHO, this should be made Policy ASAP.
--
Yann Dirson <ydirson@a2points.com> | Stop making M$-Bill richer & richer,
alt-email: <dirson@univ-mlv.fr> | support Debian GNU/Linux:
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