Re: Remaining dependency on setlocale()

On Wed, 2025-06-11 at 12:15 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > v1-0008-Set-process-LC_COLLATE-C-and-LC_CTYPE-C.patch
> >
> > As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I don't think we can do this
> > for
> > LC_CTYPE, because otherwise system error messages would not come
> > out
> > in
> > the right encoding.
>
> Changed it so that it only sets LC_COLLATE to C, and leaves LC_CTYPE
> set to datctype.
>
> Unfortunately, as long as LC_CTYPE is set to a real locale, there's a
> danger of accidentally depending on that setting. Can the encoding be
> controlled with LC_MESSAGES instead of LC_CTYPE?
>
> Do you have an example of how things can go wrong?

I looked into this a bit, and if I understand correctly, the only
problem is with strerror() and strerror_r(), which depend on
LC_MESSAGES for the language but LC_CTYPE to find the right encoding.

I attached some example C code to illustrate how strerror() is affected
by both LC_MESSAGES and LC_CTYPE. For example:

$ ./strerror de_DE.UTF-8 de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE set to: de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES set to: de_DE.UTF-8
Error message (from strerror(EILSEQ)): Ungültiges oder
unvollständiges Multi-Byte- oder Wide-Zeichen
$ ./strerror C de_DE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE set to: C
LC_MESSAGES set to: de_DE.UTF-8
Error message (from strerror(EILSEQ)): Ung?ltiges oder
unvollst?ndiges Multi-Byte- oder Wide-Zeichen

On unix-based systems, we can use newlocale() to initialize a global
variable with both LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES set. The LC_MESSAGES
portion would need to be updated every time the GUC changes, which is
not great.

Windows would be a different story, though: strerror() doesn't seem to
have a variant that accepts a _locale_t object, and even if it did, I
don't see a way to create a _locale_t object with LC_MESSAGES and
LC_CTYPE set to different values. One idea is to use
_configthreadlocale(_ENABLE_PER_THREAD_LOCALE), and then use
setlocale(), which could enable us to use setlocale() similar to how we
use uselocale() on other systems. That would be awkward, though.

Thoughts? That seems like a lot of work just for the case of
strerror()/strerror_r().

Regards,
Jeff Davis

[1]
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/configthreadlocale?view=msvc-170