Re: Locale Problems

["Kevin D. Knerr, Sr." <kknerrsr ptdprolog net>]

On  4 Sep, David Lloyd wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> I'm not sure where to post this problem, so if you think there's a more
> appropriate place please tell me. I have a locale problem...I'm trying
> to build glibc from source and have used the following to do so:
> 
> CFLAGS="lots of options" ./configure --enable-add-ons
> 
> It picks up the "crypt" and "linuxthreads" add on but doesn't seem to
> notice the locale or localedata add on. Hence, most Gtk+ and gnome
> programs, perl and various other programs complain that "The C library
> does not support locale". I looked up the web and found that doing the
> following:
> 
> localedef -i en_US -f ISO-8859-1 en_US
> 
> Might fix the problem. However it does not. I then tried the following:
> 
> ./configure --enable-add-ons=linuxthreads,crypt,locale,localedata
> 
> And I got:
> 
> configuring in locale
> configure: warning: no configuration information is in locale
> configuring in localedata
> configure: warning: no configuration information is in localedata
> 
> There is a make file but no configure.in inside the localedata
> directory. Nonetheless the README says to add "localedata" to the add
> ons as I specified. GLIBC's own README says that simply typing
> "--enable-add-ons" will check all directories, and if it finds they are
> an ad-on, will add on said directory.

I, for one, will be very interested in what fix you finally discover.
There have been recurring threads regarding locale support. During the
last manifestation, I became convinced that it really *is* a glibc issue
in that somehow the "*" locale (the user-definable one) is not being
enabled.

FWIW, I'm using Slackware 7.1 as my base, and all the locales are
correctly installed. As long as I have LC_ALL=C (the "portable" locale,
glibc's default), I have no problems. As soon as I try to use another
locale, I get the "locale not supported" warnings--even though my test
apps *do* display the selected language.

I too noted the discrepancies in the glibc compilation instructions, but
have received no answers to date.

Bottom line is that we need to ensure that distributions are compiling
glibc correctly for locale support. Can anyone help by finding out what
arguments each distro uses to configure glibc?? If we match that with
the distros that use locales correctly out of the box, we ought to be
able to settle this once and for all.

As I noted in my Aug 2 post to the list on the subject, Slackware 7.1
has two config options (w & w/o descrypt):

  descrypt.SlackBuild:  --enable-add-ons=linuxthreads,crypt
  glibc.build:          --enable-add-ons=linuxthreads

But, as I said before, the locale data *is* correctly installed--it
seems only that the locale support within glibc is not.

Tchuss!

Barthel
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