On Sun, Nov 23, 2025 at 05:23:15PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> The issue you unveiled with transliteration in C is more general than
> what you experienced with @expansion on sectioning command line.  In
> every situation where transliteration happens, there will be encoding
> errors output and the output will be suboptimal for some characters
> corresponding to @-commands.  I actually do not think that a suboptimal
> output is so bad, because there should not be any case where
> transliteration needs to be externally consistent.  But the error
> messages are definitively bad to me.

Yes, I agree.

> One possibility could be to ignore the encoding errors when calling
> encode_with_iconv from unicode_to_transliterate.  That would actually
> have my preference.

My preference is not to transliterate at all.  As I remember, the
transliteration produces okay results for French, not so okay results for
German (missing umlauts), and disasterous results for Japanese (phonetic
transcriptions of Chinese syllables are used).

I also think it could be confusing for users to have different output for
XS and non-XS and this is something that cause problems in the future.

As it is not particularly user-visible anyway, I don't have a strong
preference, as long as the error messages go away (and the resulting
fragment identifiers remain valid and unique).

> Another possibility would be to design configure tests that test whether
> transliteration with "us-ascii//TRANSLIT" enoding gives correct
> results/doesn't set EILSEQ.  This is not my preference because it is
> more complex, and also because the test would necessarily be a run test,
> and when cross-compiling the Perl transliteration would always be
> chosen.

Yes, I'd rather not add configure tests.

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