printf and locale

[Rik]

2/23/13

All,

There's a new bug report on the tracker where the locale of the user is
causing gnuplot to choke (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?38372). 
The problem is on the development branch where printf has been patched to
respond to locale and is now emitting lines like "linewidth 0,500000"
instead of "linewidth 0.500000" which gnuplot expects.  There is already a
bug report about the locale patch causing an error in 'make check' if the
fr_FR locale is not installed.  I wonder if we haven't moved too quickly to
add locale support without considering all of the necessary changes.  It
seems to me that we either need to seriously examine the code base for all
possibe locale-aware constructs, or back off until we have enough time and
manpower to tackle this project.

--Rik