Subject: Re: bug#17056: dfa.c patch for systems with no locale support

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:04:32 -0600

On 03/27/2014 12:57 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 03/27/2014 11:48 AM, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>> What if
>> the system's setlocale() actually returns NULL?
> Then we don't know what the locale is.  Perhaps setlocale ran out of
> memory and so returned NULL.  If so, subsequent calls might use some
> weird Turkish locale with multibyte characters.  So it sounds safer to
> assume the worst in that case.

This is in main().  POSIX guarantees that until setlocale() is called
for the first time, we are in the C locale.  If you were in a library, I
could buy the argument of setlocale() returning NULL as indicative of
some rare error.  But in main(), where you are the first call, the only
thing that a NULL return implies is that your attempt to change the
locale had no effect, so it remains at the locale it was before, which
is the C locale since all programs start in the C locale.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org