"C" UTF-8 trouble

Andy Koppe andy.koppe@gmail.com
Tue Oct 6 18:46:00 GMT 2009


> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>Os it really necessary to change Cygwibn for this?  I'm wondering if we
>>should put this into /etc/profile and /etc/csh.login instead.

And also bash.bashrc (for non-login shells), zprofile and zshrc,
whatever ksh uses, ... . Yet programs that are invoked without going
through a shell still wouldn't get the setting. Same for users who've
modified those files.

Additionally, it would look like the locale for the shells themselves
could be configured that way, when that isn't actually the case,
because it's determined at shell startup.


> In my limited understanding of the issue, that sounds like a better plan
> to me.  It seems like the DLL should not be dictating this type of
> policy if we can help it because, if we make a mistake, it will require
> a new cygwin release.

Hmm, fair point.

Instead of hardcoding "C-UTF8", how about reading the initial LANG
setting from a config file, e.g. /etc/defaults/locale?

That's essentially what happens on Debian, except that init/login
scripts are responsible for reading the setting there. With Cygwin,
DLL initialization takes the place of such scripts, as e.g. regarding
/etc/fstab.

This would also provide a neat answer to the question of how to
globally change the Cygwin locale. The existing answers are both
somewhat unsatisfactory: cygwin.bat doesn't affect anything not
started through it, and the Windows environment is hard to find and
might unintentionally affect non-Cygwin programs.

Andy



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