It appears that some programs in our distribution (see logs for bug #17361 or #19166 for known examples) are trying to parse other's output, without ensuring a specific locale.
Such a behaviour can cause obscure failures (eg. dpkg-parsechangelog in #17361), or even erroneous output (the 'isnative' function in dh_lib, using dpkg-parsechangelog in the same bug, or lintian in #19166). As many programmers not using a locale are not aware of these problems, it seems important to me to add a paragraph in the Policy, demanding that any program whose output is being parsed should be run in an environment where LC_ACC is set to a fixed value, preferably "C", or all locale-influent variables (see the output of "locale") are unset. IMHO, this should be made Policy ASAP. -- Yann Dirson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Stop making M$-Bill richer & richer, alt-email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | support Debian GNU/Linux: debian-email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | more powerful, more stable ! http://www.a2points.com/homepage/3475232 | Check <http://www.debian.org/>
