Re: mhfixmsg character set conversion

[Steven Winikoff]

>That ‘i18n’ smells given the nature of the other patch I found earlier.

I now understand what you're referring to, and unsurprisingly you're right.

I didn't realize that par isn't a Manjaro package at all, but in fact
something I installed directly from the Arch User Repository.  It's
clear that you already found the AUR page for par, but for the record
I'll quote this very interesting comment from the package maintainer:

   @ifreund notified me back in march via the out-of-date mechanism that a
   new version (1.53) was available upstream¹ (yup, after 19 years since
   the 1.52 release) \o/.

   Unfortunately, the i18n patch that we are applying to the 1.52, and
   which confers par the ability to deal with UTF-8, does not apply cleanly
   to 1.53. The par author has introduced some fixes to the locale handling
   for (single byte) charsets other than US ASCII, but no support for
   multibyte encodings² yet.

   Until the i18n patch gets updated to apply to 1.53 (any uptakers?), I
   would say that we are better off as we are.

I would have guessed that that patch would be a good thing, but apparently
the author of par agrees with you that isn't, given that the patch was
offered and not accepted.

I'll build 1.53 from source myself before continuing with my testing.


>Assuming Manjaro is just picking this up from Arch Linux,

That's how things work for packages which are included in the Manjaro
repositories, which are separate from those of Arch; however, the AUR is a
community effort which maintains packages not included in the repositories
for Arch (and thus, not in Manjaro or other Arch-derived distributions).

AUR packages are typically downloaded and built from source, although a few
also offer binary downloads -- but par isn't one of those, and since the
patch is no longer available online, the AUR package for it won't even
build anymore.  Clearly the patch was available at the time I installed par
as part of the OS installation on this machine, back in December 2019.


>I think this is the shell script which builds the package.
>https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=par

It is.


>Can you try searching par again, this time with
>
>    file /usr/bin/par
>    env LC_ALL=C egrep -boa 'seems not configured' /usr/bin/par

Done, but this still produces no output.

     - Steven
-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Steven Winikoff      | "I don't want to run the world; I merely
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