Re: Revisiting byte-based C locale

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2015 at 11:00:10PM +0200, Christian Neukirchen wrote:
> Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> writes:
> 
> > On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 10:22:03PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> >> Any new opinions on the topic? Or interest in re-emphasizing a
> >> previously stated opinion? :)
> >
> > No new opinions on this? I've tentatively added drafting a new
> > proposed byte-based C locale patch as a roadmap item for this release
> > cycle, not necessarily to commit it, but as a way to re-evaluate
> > whether it's still costly to implement.
> 
> Will it support regexec on 8-bit binary data?

Yes, as long as the program has done one of the following:

- Not called setlocale at all.
- Called setlocale with an explicit "C" argument or in environment.
- Called uselocale with a locale_t for "C".

> We found out file(1)
> needs this.

Indeed, aside from the Austin Group issue 663, having this topic come
up several times in real-world usage is the motivation for
reconsidering it. I believe file(1) _attempts_ to do this right,
making use of uselocale.

Rich