Re: [Bug-XBoard] Infinite recursion

[h.g. muller]

> If Xboard is dependent on untranslated error messages from libc, it should 
> run the engines in the C locale. It can be done by calling 
> putenv("LANGUAGE=C") in the child proces before the exec() call.

It is not that simple. One would want the engines to run in the same locale 
as XBoard, in order to get translation of the engine-defined options in the 
Engine Settings dialogs. The libc messages that are recognized by XBoard 
are supposed to come from intermediaries like ssh, which you typically use 
when you run the engines on a remote machine (using -firstHost, 
-secondHost). This is needed because such interediaries might not exit when 
they fail to execute the engine binary. The engine itself, when run 
locally, can inform XBoard of its failure to start by simply quitting. 
Failure to exectute the engine is announced by XBoard to itself (i.e. from 
the child process to the main process through the pipe) using perror(), 
which presumably would use the current locale. So perhaps we should make 
the child switch to the C locale after exec failure, before using perror(). 
Is that possible?

If the engine really runs on a remote machine, I don't think it would pay 
attention to any environment variables on the local one. Or would it?