Re: [PATCH v3] t: use pre-defined utf-8 locale for testing svn

["Torsten Bögershausen" <tboegi@web.de>]

On Mon, Jun 07, 2021 at 10:01:12AM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Đoàn Trần Công Danh  <congdanhqx@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] t: use pre-defined utf-8 locale for testing svn
>
> That certainly is better than "user-specific", but a lot worse than
> "user-specified".  "pre-defined" leaves it open to question "who
> defines it?", and it is a reasonable interpretation that the locale
> may be hardcoded in the makefile, but that is not what this patch
> does.  Saying "user-specified" would not have such a problem.
>
> >> I kind of wonder if trying "C.UTF-8" would be a reasonable fallback so
> >> that people don't even have to set this extra Makefile knob. But I'm not
> >> sure if we have a good way of testing if that locale works (if we can't
> >> find the "locale" binary).
> >
> > I also think we should fallback to "C.UTF-8" instead of not testing those
> > tests.  However, I don't know if there're any systems that not have "C.UTF-8"
> > locale.
>
> I do share the feeling, but have a hunch that systems lacking
> "locale -a" may be either superset of, or has at least large overlap
> with, those lacking "C.UTF-8", and the new mechanism introduced here
> will cover both of them, so I think it is OK to stop here, at least
> for now.
>
> Thanks.

I did a little bit of digging, the first (?) usage of locale was probably
introduced in the i18n patch to use gettext and msgfmt and stuff:

commit 5e9637c629702e3d41ad01d95956d1835d7338e0
Author: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date:   Fri Nov 18 00:14:42 2011 +0100

    i18n: add infrastructure for translating Git with gettext

--------------------------

I can't get rid of the feeling, that most systems have an UTF-8
locale enabled by default these days.

What does the following give us under Linux musl ?
set | grep UTF


MacOs (my box here) has this:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=UTF-8
XTERM_LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8

If, and only if, Linux musl has a similar setup,
then we may be able to skip the Makefile knob for the moment.
Just skip locale -a, if locale is not available.
This is just a loose idea, I need to install the git-svn bindings and
test if the git-svn tests pass.