bug#54893: guix-daemon, locale, LANG, and unicode in git tag names

[Attila Lendvai]

> thank you, this works indeed as a band aid:
>
> (setenv "GUIX_LOCPATH" #+(file-append glibc-locales "/lib/locale"))
> (setlocale LC_ALL "en_US.utf8")


i spoke too early. this works in a git checkout of guix, but it fails
to compile when i try to guix pull it.

even if i declare the dependency like this:

#:autoload   (gnu packages base) (glibc-locales)

IIUC, this is due to a circular dependency: glibc-locales (and its
variants) depend on git-fetch, therefore i cannot refer to them from
the implementation of git-fetch.

i tried to set the locale to "C" or "POSIX", but it results in ASCII encoding.

i tried to set the locale to "en_US.iso-8859-1", hoping that it's
available, but it isn't.

all that is needed here is an encoding that is idempotent wrt a cycle
through bytes->string, string->bytes. i think the iso-8859-n encodings
are like that.

to verify that hypothesis:

$ mkdir -p /tmp/delme/v½.2.0
$ LANG=C guix repl
scheme@(guix-user)> (use-modules (guix build utils))
scheme@(guix-user)> (delete-file-recursively "/tmp/delme")
warning: failed to delete /tmp/delme/v??.2.0: No such file or directory
warning: failed to delete /tmp/delme: Directory not empty
$1 = #t
$2 = #<vhash 7fd60aef5540 1 pairs>
scheme@(guix-user)>

$ LANG=en_US.iso-8859-1 guix repl
scheme@(guix-user)> (use-modules (guix build utils))
scheme@(guix-user)> (delete-file-recursively "/tmp/delme")
$1 = #<vhash 7f7d7acc2040 2 pairs>
scheme@(guix-user)>


so, is such an idempotent locale available/embedded in glibc without any 
external dependencies? searching the web suggests that there isn't.

if not, then what would be a bird's eye view plan to make one
available for git-fetch?

should we create a new, ASCII-only git-fetch variant used in the bootstrap 
process?

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• attila lendvai
• PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39
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