Subject: Re: bug#22905: GUILE_INSTALL_LOCALE produces unavoidable noise

From: Zefram <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2016 00:00:13 +0100

Andy Wingo wrote:
>I believe this is consistent with other programs which call setlocale,
>notably Perl and Bash.

It is consistent with them, but the fact that others get it wrong isn't
an excuse.

>avoid the call to setlocale, and Guile offers the GUILE_INSTALL_LOCALE=0
>knob to do this.

That knob is not available to the program.  If you provide a knob that
the program can control, independent of the environment, with backward
compatibility to Guile 1.8, then we can consider the setlocale call
avoidable.

>          Probably adding the suggestion to the warning is the right
>thing; wdyt?

No, that's not an improvement.  Emitting a warning and then running
the program anyway is fundamentally broken behaviour, and tweaking the
content of the warning doesn't help.

Some way for the program to detect that you've screwed up its output,
so that it can decide to abort rather than continue with faulty output,
would be another middle way.

-zefram