Bug#721537: perl: FTBFS on hppa: lib/locale test fails

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 09:02:15AM -0400, John David Anglin wrote:
> On 2-Sep-13, at 7:59 AM, Niko Tyni wrote:
> 
> >If you have the time, upstream would surely appreciate bisecting the
> >upstream commit that broke it.  See pod/perlgit.pod in the perl source
> >tree.
> 
> 
> Based on my testing, upstream fixed the bug with the following commit:
> 
> commit 1500bd919ffeae0f3252f8d1bb28b03b043d328e
> Author: Karl Williamson <public at khwilliamson.com>
> Date:   Wed Jun 19 21:00:53 2013 -0600
> 
>     PATCH: [perl #112208]: Set utf8 flag on $! appropriately
> 
>     This patch sets the utf8 flag on $! if the error string passes utf8
>     validity tests and has some bytes with the upper bit set.  (If none
>     have that bit set, is an ASCII string, and whether or not it is
> UTF-8 is
>     irrelevant.)  This is a heuristic that could fail, but as the
> reference
>     in the comments points out this is unlikely.
> 
>     One can reasonably assume that a UTF-8 locale will return a UTF-8
>     result.  So another approach would be to look at that (but we
> wouldn't
>     want to turn the flag on for a purely ASCII string anyway, as
> that could
>     change the semantics from existing behavior by making the string
> follow
>     Unicode rules, whereas it didn't necessarily before.)  To do
> this, we
>     could keep track of the utf8ness of the LC_MESSAGES locale.  But
> until
>     the heuristic in this patch is shown to not be good enough, I
> don't see
>     the need to do this extra work.
> 
> There were a number of other locale related patches just prior to
> this one.
> 
> Upstream bug is perl #119567.

Thanks for confirming. This patch is in perl 5.20, now available in
unstable. Could you confirm whether this fixes the problem for you in
the Debian package?

Cheers,
Dominic.