Bug#1027680: gtk4: FTBFS on some systems (with non-UTF-8 locale?)

[Simon McVittie]

Control: tags -1 - patch
Control: retitle -1 gtk4: FTBFS on some systems (with non-UTF-8 locale?)

On Sun, 01 Jan 2023 at 20:20:07 +0100, László Böszörményi wrote:
> Your package fails to build with the new major tiff release. During
> self-testing one of those fails. The reason is that the output now has
> a question mark instead of the quotation marks. Maybe it's just in my
> system?

This looks like you're building GTK in a non-UTF-8 locale, perhaps
LC_ALL=C, in which non-ASCII in GLib log messages gets converted from
UTF-8 to the locale encoding with lossy transliteration, and in particular
directional quotes are transliterated to "?". Ideally they should become
non-directional quotes, but I think this is a glibc decision rather than
a GLib decision (GLib just uses iconv(3) if I remember correctly).

What locale environment variables did you use for this build? Relevant
variables include LANG, LANGUAGE and everything starting with LC_.
The locale command should summarize them all.

It seems the glibc maintainers are in the process of deprecating non-UTF-8
locales, so this should hopefully solve itself when those locales become
unavailable or officially unsupported.

> --- gtk4-4.8.2+ds.orig/testsuite/tools/validate-data/invalid4.expected
> +++ gtk4-4.8.2+ds/testsuite/tools/validate-data/invalid4.expected
> @@ -1 +1 @@
> -Gtk-WARNING: Failed to find accessible property “text”: Could not parse enum: 'text'
> +Gtk-WARNING: Failed to find accessible property ?text?: Could not parse enum: 'text'

This is not a suitable patch because it would make the tests fail on any
system where they currently succeed, which notably seems to include the
official Debian buildds.

A better solution would be to force a UTF-8 locale in debian/rules (like
glib2.0 does), or possibly force a UTF-8 locale centrally in debhelper,
dpkg-buildpackage, sbuild or similar so that individual packages'
maintainers don't have to deal with this.

It appears the official Debian buildds have LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 and no other
LC_*, LANG or LANGUAGE variables.

    smcv