(Sorry for the late reply.)
On Mon, 9 Mar 1998, Yann Dirson wrote:
> 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.
I don't think this is a topic which belongs to the policy manual. (For
example, the policy manual doesn't include a statement like `dereferencing
NULL pointers is evil' either.)
If we had a `Debian Programmer's Manual', this could go there--but since
we don't do a lot of programming ourselves, we'll probably never have such
a manual.
Any other opinions?
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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