glfs/introduction/important/locale-issues.xml

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<sect1 id="locale-issues" xreflabel="Locale Related Issues">
  <?dbhtml filename="locale-issues.html"?>

  <sect1info>
    <othername>$LastChangedBy$</othername>
    <date>$Date$</date>
  </sect1info>

  <title>Locale Related Issues</title>

  <para>This page contains information about locale related problems and
  issues. In the following paragraphs you'll find a generic overview of
  things that can come up when configuring your system for various locales.
  Many (but not all) existing locale related problems can be classified
  and fall under one of the headings below. The severity ratings below use
  the following criteria:</para>

  <itemizedlist>
    <listitem>
      <para>Critical: The program doesn't perform its main function.
      The fix would be very intrusive, it's better to search for a
      replacement.</para>
    </listitem>
    <listitem>
      <para>High: Part of the functionality that the program provides
      is not usable. If that functionality is required, it's better to
      search for a replacement.</para>
    </listitem>
    <listitem>
      <para>Low: The program works in all typical use cases, but lacks
      some functionality normally provided by its equivalents.</para>
    </listitem>
  </itemizedlist>

  <para>If there is a known workaround for a specific package, it will
  appear on that package's page. For the most recent information
  about locale related issues for individual packages, check the
  <ulink url="&blfs-wiki;/BlfsNotes">User Notes</ulink> in the BLFS
  Wiki.</para>

  <sect2 id="locale-not-valid-option"
         xreflabel="Needed Encoding Not a Valid Option">

    <title>The Needed Encoding is Not a Valid Option in the Program</title>

    <para>Severity: Critical</para>

    <para>Some programs require the user to specify the character encoding
    for their input or output data and present only a limited choice of
    encodings. This is the case for the <option>-X</option> option in
    <xref linkend="a2ps"/> and <xref linkend="enscript"/>,
    the <option>-input-charset</option> option in unpatched
    <xref linkend="cdrtools"/>, and the character sets offered for display
    in the menu of <xref linkend="Links"/>. If the required encoding is not
    in the list, the program usually becomes completely unusable. For
    non-interactive programs, it may be possible to work around this by
    converting the document to a supported input character set before
    submitting to the program.</para>

    <para>A solution to this type of problem is to implement the necessary
    support for the missing encoding as a patch to the original program
    (as done for <xref linkend="cdrtools"/> in this book), or to find a
    replacement.</para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="locale-assumed-encoding"
         xreflabel="Program Assumes Encoding">

    <title>The Program Assumes the Locale-Based Encoding of External
    Documents</title>

    <para>Severity: High for non-text documents, low for text
    documents</para>

    <para>Some programs, <xref linkend="nano"/> or
    <xref linkend="joe"/> for example, assume that documents are always
    in the encoding implied by the current locale. While this assumption
    may be valid for the user-created documents, it is not safe for
    external ones. When this assumption fails, non-ASCII characters are
    displayed incorrectly, and the document may become unreadable.</para>

    <para>If the external document is entirely text based, it can be
    converted to the current locale encoding using the
    <command>iconv</command> program.</para>

    <para>For documents that are not text-based, this is not possible.
    In fact, the assumption made in the program may be completely
    invalid for documents where the Microsoft Windows operating system
    has set de facto standards. An example of this problem is ID3v1 tags
    in MP3 files (see the <ulink url="&blfs-wiki;/ID3v1Coding">BLFS Wiki
    ID3v1Coding page</ulink>
    for more details). For these cases, the only solution is to find a
    replacement program that doesn't have the issue (e.g., one that
    will allow you to specify the assumed document encoding).</para>

    <para>Among BLFS packages, this problem applies to
    <xref linkend="nano"/>, <xref linkend="joe"/>, and all media players
    except <xref linkend="audacious"/>.</para>

    <para>Another problem in this category is when someone cannot read
    the documents you've sent them because their operating system is
    set up to handle character encodings differently. This can happen
    often when the other person is using Microsoft Windows, which only
    provides one character encoding for a given country. For example,
    this causes problems with UTF-8 encoded TeX documents created in
    Linux. On Windows, most applications will assume that these documents
    have been created using the default Windows 8-bit encoding. See the
    <ulink url="&blfs-wiki;/tetex">teTeX</ulink> Wiki page for more
    details.</para>

    <para>In extreme cases, Windows encoding compatibility issues may be
    solved only by running Windows programs under
    <ulink url="http://www.winehq.com/">Wine</ulink>.</para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="locale-wrong-filename-encoding"
         xreflabel="Wrong Filename Encoding">

    <title>The Program Uses or Creates Filenames in the Wrong Encoding</title>

    <para>Severity: Critical</para>

    <para>The POSIX standard mandates that the filename encoding is
    the encoding implied by the current LC_CTYPE locale category. This
    information is well-hidden on the page which specifies the behavior
    of <application>Tar</application> and <application>Cpio</application>
    programs. Some programs get it wrong by default (or simply don't
    have enough information to get it right). The result is that they
    create filenames which are not subsequently shown correctly by
    <command>ls</command>, or they refuse to accept filenames that
    <command>ls</command> shows properly. For the <xref linkend="glib2"/>
    library, the problem can be corrected by setting the
    <envar>G_FILENAME_ENCODING</envar> environment variable to the special
    "@locale" value. <application>Glib2</application> based programs that
    don't respect that environment variable are buggy.</para>

    <para>The <xref linkend="zip"/>, <xref linkend="unzip"/>, and
    <xref linkend="nautilus-cd-burner"/> have this problem because
    they hard-code the expected filename encoding.
    <application>UnZip</application> contains a hard-coded conversion
    table between the CP850 (DOS) and ISO-8859-1 (UNIX) encodings and
    uses this table when extracting archives created under DOS or
    Microsoft Windows. However, this assumption only works for those
    in the US and not for anyone using a UTF-8 locale. Non-ASCII
    characters will be mangled in the extracted filenames.</para>

    <para>On the other hand,
    <application>Nautilus CD Burner</application> checks names of
    files added to its window for UTF-8 validity. This is wrong for
    users of non-UTF-8 locales. Also,
    <application>Nautilus CD Burner</application> unconditionally
    calls <command>mkisofs</command> with the
    <parameter>-input-charset UTF-8</parameter> parameter, which is
    only correct in UTF-8 locales.</para>

    <para>The general rule for avoiding this class of problems is to
    avoid installing broken programs. If this is impossible, the
    <ulink url="http://j3e.de/linux/convmv/">convmv</ulink>
    command-line tool can be used to fix filenames created by these
    broken programs, or intentionally mangle the existing filenames
    to meet the broken expectations of such programs.</para>

    <para>In other cases, a similar problem is caused by importing
    filenames from a system using a different locale with a tool that
    is not locale-aware (e.g., <xref linkend="nfs-utils"/> or
    <xref linkend="openssh"/>). In order to avoid mangling non-ASCII
    characters when transferring files to a system with a different
    locale, any of the following methods can be used:</para>

    <itemizedlist>
      <listitem>
        <para>Transfer anyway, fix the damage with
        <command>convmv</command>.</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>On the sending side, create a tar archive with the
        <parameter>--format=posix</parameter> switch passed to
        <command>tar</command> (this will be the default in a future
        version of <command>tar</command>).</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>Mail the files as attachments. Mail clients specify the
        encoding of attached filenames.</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>Write the files to a removable disk formatted with a FAT or
        FAT32 filesystem.</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>Transfer the files using Samba.</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
        <para>Transfer the files via FTP using RFC2640-aware server
        (this currently means only wu-ftpd, which has bad security history)
        and client (e.g., lftp).</para>
      </listitem>
    </itemizedlist>

    <para>The last four methods work because the filenames are automatically
    converted from the sender's locale to UNICODE and stored or sent in this
    form. They are then transparently converted from UNICODE to the
    recipient's locale encoding.</para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="locale-wrong-multibyte-characters"
         xreflabel="Breaks Multibyte Characters">

    <title>The Program Breaks Multibyte Characters or Doesn't Count
    Character Cells Correctly</title>

    <para>Severity: High or critical</para>

    <para>Many programs were written in an older era where multibyte
    locales were not common. Such programs assume that C "char" data
    type, which is one byte, can be used to store single characters.
    Further, they assume that any sequence of characters is a valid
    string and that every character occupies a single character cell.
    Such assumptions completely break in UTF-8 locales. The visible
    manifestation is that the program truncates strings prematurely
    (i.e., at 80 bytes instead of 80 characters). Terminal-based
    programs don't place the cursor correctly on the screen, don't react
    to the "Backspace" key by erasing one character, and leave junk
    characters around when updating the screen, usually turning the
    screen into a complete mess.</para>

    <para>Fixing this kind of problems is a tedious task from a
    programmer's point of view, like all other cases of retrofitting new
    concepts into the old flawed design. In this case, one has to redesign
    all data structures in order to accommodate to the fact that a complete
    character may span a variable number of "char"s (or switch to wchar_t
    and convert as needed). Also, for every call to the "strlen" and
    similar functions, find out whether a number of bytes, a number of
    characters, or the width of the string was really meant. Sometimes it
    is faster to write a program with the same functionality from scratch.
    </para>

    <para>Among BLFS packages, this problem applies to
    <xref linkend="ed"/>, <xref linkend="xine-ui"/> and all shells.</para>

  </sect2>

  <sect2 id="locale-wrong-manpage-encoding"
         xreflabel="Incorrect Manual Page Encoding">

    <title>The Package Installs Manual Pages in Incorrect or
    Non-Displayable Encoding</title>

    <para>Severity: Low</para>

    <para>LFS expects that manual pages are in the language-specific (usually
    8-bit) encoding, as specified on the <ulink
    url="&lfs-root;/chapter06/man-db.html">LFS Man DB page</ulink>. However,
    some packages install translated manual pages in UTF-8 encoding (e.g.,
    Shadow, already dealt with), or manual pages in languages not in the table.
    Not all BLFS packages have been audited for conformance with the
    requirements put in LFS (the large majority have been checked, and fixes
    placed in the book for packages known to install non-conforming manual
    pages). If you find a manual page installed by any of BLFS packages that is
    obviously in the wrong encoding, please remove or convert it as needed, and
    report this to BLFS team as a bug.</para>

    <para>You can easily check your system for any non-conforming manual pages
    by copying the following short shell script to some accessible location,

<screen><literal>#!/bin/sh
# Begin checkman.sh
# Usage: find /usr/share/man -type f | xargs checkman.sh
for a in "$@"
do
    # echo "Checking $a..."
    # Pure-ASCII manual page (possibly except comments) is OK
    grep -v '.\\"' "$a" | iconv -f US-ASCII -t US-ASCII >/dev/null 2>&amp;1 \
        &amp;&amp; continue
    # Non-UTF-8 manual page is OK
    iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8 "$a" >/dev/null 2>&amp;1 || continue
    # If we got here, we found UTF-8 manual page, bad.
    echo "UTF-8 manual page: $a" >&amp;2
done
# End checkman.sh
</literal></screen>

    and then issuing the following command (modify the command below if the
    <command>checkman.sh</command> script is not in your <envar>PATH</envar>
    environment variable):</para>

<screen><userinput>find /usr/share/man -type f | xargs checkman.sh</userinput></screen>

    <para>Note that if you have manual pages installed in any location other
    than <filename class='directory'>/usr/share/man</filename> (e.g.,
    <filename class='directory'>/usr/local/share/man</filename>), you must
    modify the above command to include this additional location.</para>

  </sect2>

</sect1>