Bug#220657: [xibs-static-dev/mgapdesk] Please consider reassigning to mgapdesk
Hello,
the upload of X11R7 to unstable is stirring things up, and as I read
that xlibs-static-dev is being dropped, I remember my oldest Debian bug.
:-) I had filed this bug against mgapdesk initially, but later
suggested that it's a problem of libxf86config, and it was thus
reassigned to xlibs-static-dev. There was no BTS activity since then.
About a year ago, I've been investigating this bug more thoroughly
in the hope to fix it in time for Sarge, but didn't finish.
Unfortunately, today I cannot find the notes I made then, but it might
still be useful to share my findings, as far as I can remember them.
Investigating the libxf86config code revealed there are so many
exported/exposed functions accessing the XF86Config file directly, that
wrapping them all with appropriate setlocale() calls doesn't look
reasonable. Whereas it should be easy to isolate the code in the main
program that makes use of libxf86config and wrap _that_.
Searching the net for other programs using libxf86config, I found
pyxf86config [1], a Python wrapper for libxf86config. And indeed it
takes care to set the locale to "C" before calling libxf86config, and
resetting it afterwards. And it's simple and easy. So I dare to
conclude that my first analysis was wrong, the lack of any locale
handling in libxf86config is a sensible design decision of its authors,
and it's mgapdesk that should be fixed. Sorry for the (probably) wrong
first shot.
Have a nice day,
Nikolaus
[1] This is a Redhat RPM:
<http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/i386/os/SRPMS/pyxf86config-0.3.19-4.src.rpm>
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