Bug#602471: pymca: package unusable

[V. Armando Solé]

Hi

On 08/11/2010 18:08, Teemu Ikonen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks for debugging this. I can reproduce the bug by starting pymca with
>
> LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 pymca
>
> Interestingly, instantiating QApplication class makes the scanf call
> in the specfile module use the locale-based numeric format. See the
> attached testcase.
>
> The quick and dirty fix would be to add the line
> export LC_NUMERIC=C
> as a second or third line to /usr/bin/pymca
>
> But, there is probably a smarter way to fix this.

I have made the specfile module insensitive to the LC_NUMERIC locale 
when used in POSIX systems but I really do not know if that is better 
than forcing myself the locale in PyMca just after instantiating 
QApplication.

Building specfile with the SPECFILE_POSIX flag, uses an atof  
replacement function that reads current LC_NUMERIC locale, changes it to 
C, performs atof and restores the LC_NUMERIC locale. The problem is that 
it can be made thousands of times when reading a file.

Building specfile with the PYMCA_POSIX flag, does the same thing but 
outside the loop over all the lines of the file.

In my case, I have foreseen to use the PYMCA_POSIX flag when building 
specfile within PyMca and SPECFILE_POSIX flag when building the specfile 
module as an standalone. You can take a look at the main PyMca setup.py 
file and at the ./specfile/setup.py file.

Please let me know if you consider that a cleaner solution.

Best regards,

Armando