Re: texinfo 6.1, 6.3: warning messages in no-locale setups

[Gavin Smith]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 02:18:22PM -0700, Michael Deutschmann wrote:
> (Not trimming because of the delay between this response and the original 
> discussion):
> On Sun, 29 Jan 2017, you wrote:
> > On 25 January 2017 at 05:03, Michael Deutschmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > On my system, a vanilla build of texinfo 6.3 frequently outputs a message:
> > >
> > > sh: 1: locale: not found
> > > Couldn't set UTF-8 character type in locale.
> > >
> > > In turn, this causes a dozen "make check" tests to FAIL.
> > >
> > > The problem is one chunk of code that badly wants to find and change to a
> > > locale with the wanted character set.  This is futile on my system as I
> > > am running uClibc with locales compiled out.  There is no locale utility
> > > and setlocale() is a constant function.
> > 
> > I've deleted the error message "Couldn't set UTF-8 character type in
> > locale." because it's easy to do so. I think the tests will still fail
> > on your system with the error message from "sh" ("locale: not found")
> > because I think that popen doesn't do anything with standard error. I
> > haven't researched how to fix this; suggestions welcome.
> >
> > Presumably Perl has its own UTF-8 support and doesn't need to use that
> > of libc, so the fallback module can still work correctly.
> 
> Sorry it took so long for me to get back to you...
> 
> I think the proper way to handle this is to check for the existence of a
> "locale" command-line utitity at *configure* time.
> 
> The utility peeks behind the C library's abstraction barrier, so if
> present it is going to be in the same "package" as the C library.  So it
> is unlikely "locale" could be absent while compiling texinfo but present
> later, or vice versa.

It doesn't do any harm to check for "locale" at run-time, does it?  
Maybe it's true that "locale" will never be installed (or uninstalled) 
after Texinfo is built, but it seems more flexible to do the check at
run-time, just in case.