GNU bug report logs - #17189
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From: Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>
To: Nikos Balkanas <nbalkanas <at> gmail.com>
Cc: 17189-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#17189: Sort bug #2
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 06:49:53 -0600

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On 04/05/2014 01:19 PM, Nikos Balkanas wrote:

>>
>> No, earlier distributions merely defaulted to LC_ALL=C instead of
>> LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8.  This complaint is the same as your previous one,
>> and the solution is the same - if you want sorting by bytes, then ensure
>> that your locale is set to C rather than en_US.UTF-8.
>>
>> Thank you all. As I explained in my previous mail, an update of the man
> pages is essential. A change in the UI would also be desirable,
> if the standards allow it. Sorry, about my attitude, but I was getting
> pretty desperate. Thanks for not flaming.
> 
> To make it up I will look into updating the man pages ;-)

But the man page ALREADY says this:

       ***  WARNING  ***  The locale specified by the environment
affects sort
       order.  Set LC_ALL=C to get the traditional sort order that uses
native
       byte values.

What more are you proposing?

> 
> A suggestion. I think that sort should sort text based on the LOCALE of
> the file, not the system. Couldn't it detect automatically from the text,
> whether it is is dealing with UTF-8 or iso?

Unfortunately, no, this is not possible.  You're welcome to try and
write a patch to prove me wrong, but people have already had years of
experience of using environment variables as the way to tell a program
what encoding an input file uses, precisely because there is no other
obvious way of determining a file's locale.

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

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