izabera did make a good point in IRC the other
day for why we
will need to have two locales at the very least in
MirBSD – C and C.UTF-8 (the latter being widespread
enough by now,
thanks to me,
interestingly enough. He uses code which leads to unexpected results…
$ generate() { tr -dc "[:alnum:]" < /dev/urandom | dd bs="$len" count=1; }
$ len=10; echo $(generate 2>/dev/null)
Ut流54Ȫf
… because
tr(1) was the first utility I
converted to Unicode, to explore possibilities and craft the
OPTU encoding
and, thus, “流” is, indeed, an alphanumeric character.
This implies two things: we need to change MirBSD libc locale functions
back to support two charsets (and make
setlocale(3) match), and
mksh(1)
should implement locale tracking (to change set ±U whenever one
of the relevant parameters (${LC_ALL:-${LC_CTYPE:-${LANG:-C}}})
changes in the session; users could still set utf8-mode manually
though). For this to not break anything, we’ll have to audit scripts in
MirBSD though (usually adding export LC_ALL=C at their begin is
enough, and we need this for portable scripts anyway) and remove all
occurrences of #ifndef __MirBSD__ before
setlocale(3) calls in
applications. This will take a while.
Secondly, I opened
an
issue with POSIX about handling of the (deprecated, and for good reason)
`-style command substitutions. The GNU autoconf texinfo manual gives
good advice for portable shell scripts, and we all knew that foo="bar
`echo \"baz\"`" wasn’t portable due to use of more than one set of double
quotes, but my (and the yash authors’) reading of the standard (and
mksh R52’s POSIX mode) make it set $foo to
bar "baz" instead of the historic bar baz now, and I wish
to get this clarified (and, possibly, the standard changed to match historic
practice, as this breaks at least the Acrobat Reader 5 start script). Nothing
has been decided yet (due to the holidays, I’m sure), but we got input from
some other people involved in shell.
So, if any #!/bin/sh scripts break or behave weirdly with R52,
you now know why. I’m waiting for an official statement.
![[OS X] Unleash your inner console cowboy](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ltyYh4ysBHI/U04MKlHc6pI/AAAAAAAADQo/PFxXaGZu9PQ/w200-h150-c/no-image.png "[OS X] Unleash your inner console cowboy")
