Re: [PATCH/RFC] Change t0204-gettext-reencode-sanity.sh to pass under Mac OSX

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 21:39, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

I do not see any reason to insist that their fallback behaviour must
be to fill them with question marks.  In other words, I simply do
not see the point of this test and the original "pass runs of
question" to begin with, and this patch makes things even worse.

Why not get rid of this single test that only tries to check the
output for an impossible request?

Ævar, am I missing something?

Sorry about the late reply, I think if anything it needs to be
expanded beyond its current scope.

Our gettext implementation is peculiar in two ways:

 * We support 3 different languages, one of which (Perl) is supported
   through a non-GNU package.

 * We have this fantastic hack in gettext.c's init_gettext_charset to
   deal with a glibc bug.

I think in particular re-encoding works completely differently under
the Perl i18n library than it does with GNU gettext (and we don't have
tests for this) and instead of just dropping unknown characters under
non-UTF-8 locales on some platforms everything may turn into complete
gibberish.

When I added this test this was what I was planning to smoke
out. Different behaviors on different platforms. In this case the OSX
behavior seems benign, but I'd much rather patch the test to detect
OSX rather than removing it entirely, maybe other obscure operating
systems (Aix, HP/UX etc.) will behave differently.

We still don't really have any use of the i18n feature, i.e. we
haven't had translations submitted yet, and thus don't have any
users. I think it's important to be pro-active about trying to spot
any issues that might affect end users before they happen.