[Aptitude-devel] Bug#357828: logging should be locale-independent

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 + pending
Control: unmerge -1

Marking as pending, then unmerging.

Unmerging because this was mostly about the dates and the other about
the messages, so keeping it separate just in case that it needs to be
reopened and treated differently than the other ones.

This one contradicts #489706, which was applied later than this and is
the current one... which suggests that maybe dates were already
localized before this bug, then changed, then changed again before the
other was submitted...

So it looks like date format strings were changed a few times back and
forth between being localized and not and that everybody has a different
opinion about it.

-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>


2006-03-19 18:48 Robert Bihlmeyer:
>Package: aptitude
>Version: 0.4.1-1
>Severity: minor
>
>It seems that at least the second line of each stanza (containing the
>date) in /var/log/aptitude is depending on the locale that aptitude is
>running under.
>
>I think this is problematic.
>
>Logfiles should be machine-parseable. But the parser has no easy way
>to find out what locale was used, so it would need to be able handle
>all of them, in principle.
>
>Running aptitude a number of times, it will normally just append to
>the current log. If the runs were made with different locales active,
>this will result in a file with different date formats for the same
>date, which seems evil. Surely evil is the case I am currently looking
>at, where the encoding changes mid-file: some stanzas are in
>iso8859-1, others in utf-8.
>
>My proposal is to always pretend that something like "en_US.UTF-8" was
>in effect for logging, i.e. encode in UTF-8 (though everything
>*should* be ASCII, afaics) and use English messages, date format, etc.
>
>Thanks for considering,
>Robbe
>