Re: Texinfo 7.0.93 pretest available

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2023 18:09:15 +0100
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, bug-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> On Mon, Oct 09, 2023 at 11:32:49PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > It is supposed to attempt to force the locale to a UTF-8 locale.  You
> > > can see the code in xspara_init that attempts to change the locale.  There
> > > is also a comment before xspara_add_text:
> > > 
> > >   "This function relies on there being a UTF-8 locale in LC_CTYPE for
> > >   mbrtowc to work correctly."
> > 
> > That's an inherently unportable thing. You can't just force an UTF-8
> > locale if the system does not have it.
> 
> The module shouldn't load if it can't switch to a UTF-8 locale.  xspara_init
> returns a different value if these attempts fail leading the code loading
> the module (in Texinfo::XSLoader) to fall back to the pure Perl version.

If the inability to load the UTF-8 locale means the modules cannot be
loaded, I consider that a serious problem, because Perl implementation
is slower.  We need every possible way of speeding up texi2any,
because the speed regression since Texinfo moved to the Perl
implementation is significant, so much so that some refuse to upgrade
from Texinfo 4.13 (and thus hold back usage of new Texinfo features in
the various GNU manuals).  We cannot afford losing speedups due to
such issues, especially since they are solvable using readily
available libraries.

> It would be good to get away from the attempts to switch to a UTF-8 locale
> but I doubt it is urgent to do before the release, as the current approach,
> however flawed, has been in place and worked fairly well for a long time
> (since the XS paragraph module was written).  At the time it seemed to be
> the only way to get the information from wcwidth.

Then what do you propose to do about this in the MinGW port of Texinfo
7.1?  And why is it urgent to release Texinfo 7.1 without fixing this
issue?