Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 1/2] Partially revert commit d4e5ec877ca

[Matthias Maier]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2018, at 04:42 CDT, Daniel P. Berrangé <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 11:40:41PM -0500, Matthias Maier wrote:
>> This commit removes the PYTHON_UTF8 workaround. The problem with setting
>> 
>>   LC_ALL= LANG=C LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
>> 
>> is that the en_US.UTF-8 locale might not be available. In this case
>
> What platform are you using where  UTF8 locale is not available ?

For example, neither Debian (and for that matter Ubuntu) nor Gentoo
guarantee that the en_US.UTF-8 locale is available.

We in particular encounter build problems on Gentoo when users have only
set very specific, non en_US locales, for example de_DE.UTF-8 (or
similar).

> Indeed I would ideally like to make the entire of QEMU build with an
> explicit en_US.UTF-8 or C.UTF-8 locale, to ensure that we get reliably
> reproducible builds, as locale differences have been known to impact
> output of many tools not just python.

We face the same problem in Gentoo and usually advice users to set
LC_ALL=C when submitting bug reports. (It is frustrating that glibc
upstream doesn't get their act together fixing and merging the current
C.UTF-8 proposal.)

So what about making the build system more robust (by merging the
patches, or a variant) and either setting C.UTF-8, or C globally
(depending on availability)?

Best,
Matthias