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

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] writes:

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,...

I am not sure where you are drawing the line between "complete
gibberish" and "incorrect transliteration", but if you mean by
"gibberish" something that makes user's terminal go berserk,
spitting out UTF-8 when the reader has asked for and is expecting
Latin-1 is already throwing "gibberish", so Mac OS X should fail the
test, I would think.

But for this particular test case, it is even worse, as the test is
asking to do an impossible task to the transliteration machinery, so
it is not even "gibberish" test.  If the input caused the program to
terminate without an error but without producing an output, that
won't be "gibberish" case, but should that be treated as "success"?

I think it's important to be pro-active about trying to spot
any issues that might affect end users before they happen.

The goal is noble, but asking the platform to perform an impossible
task and subjectively judging if the failure mode is acceptable is
not the way to do so, I would have to say.