Packages that don't work in multibyte locales and cannot be fixed

[alexander@…]

Please put a <warning> tag on the pages of the following packages and say that they don't work in multibyte locales and cannot be fixed:

• Ed-0.2 (operations, such as deletion, that should work on characters, in fact work on bytes and thus damage multibyte characters. This bug doesn't affect the use of Ed in the book because the instructions in the book never ask ed to operate on non-ASCII characters)
• ASH-0.4.0 (the backspace key doesn't erase multibyte characters properly, and "?" matches a byte, not a character)
• Tcsh-6.14.00 (the same, doesn't affect the use of Tcsh in the book)
• Ispell-3.2.06.epa7 (if the locale encoding is not the same as the dictionary encoding, it treats all words as misspellings, also we don't even make it 8-bit clean). Remove?
• Links-2.1pre21
• Pine-4.64 (cannot properly display and type non-ASCII characters, patch exists but is untested)
• Dillo-0.8.5 (hardcodes the character set to ISO-8859-1, we have instructions to change this, but they are insufficient and are better removed)
• a2ps-4.13b
• Enscript-1.6.4

The list is probably incomplete.

[alexander@…]

Pine is actually fixable (and the fix works), see Ticket #1958.

[bdubbs@…]

I am going to mark this as won't fix. If we mark pages as not having UTF-8 support, it implies that we have tested every other page as having adequate UTF-8 support and that isn't true.

You can always add a comment to the usernotes to document this behavior.

[dnicholson@…]

Reopening ticket because I think it needs more discussion.

I would like to see these warnings go into the book. The way I see it, if there's a known problem with a package, it should be noted in the book. Alexander has spent a great deal of time investigating these problems, and I'd hate to see that information not be put to use. I'll be willing to add information for the packages Alexander has noted.

If we aren't going to say that the packages in the book support UTF-8, then we should be up front about it. The Locale Related Issues page should say that, possibly with a note to check the Wiki for information about specific packages. But LFS-6.2 supports multibyte locales, so I think we should at least add the information given by Alexander to say which packages are not going to work under the assumed base system.

That's my two cents. Please comment one way or the other, because the book will have to be changed. If it's decided that we aren't going to mention broken UTF-8 packages, then the nano/mc/unzip/pine/nautilus-cd-burner stuff has to leave because it shouldn't get special treatment over a2ps, etc.

[Randy McMurchy]

Assigning to Alexander, as he mentioned he will close this ticket after adding some info to the Wiki.

[Randy McMurchy]

As this ticket only requires a modification to the Wiki, I'm moving it to the 6.2.1 milestone in an effort to have all 6.2.0 tickets closed when 6.2.0-rc2 is released.

[alexander@…]

Added some text to teTeX and GPM wiki pages. This is enough to mark this bug as fixed.

[(none)]

Milestone 6.2.1 deleted