Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2019 16:18:49 +0100
From: Joerg Sonnenberger <jo...@bec.de>
Message-ID: <20190124151849.ga10...@britannica.bec.de>
| This is overcomplicated and fragile, IMO. Can we just go back to the old
| code and switch the strtod to strtod_l with LC_C_LOCALE? That solves the
| input problem.
We could certainly do that, but while it is a little complicated, I do not
really think it is fragile. Using a locale specific decimal radix in a
script is fragile - but the only way to avoid that is either to effectively
give up on non-C locales entirely for scripts, or drop all support for
fractional numbers as args to any command.
Note: the arg to "sleep" might come as ...
echo -n "How many seconds do you want to sleep? "
read secs
sleep "${secs}"
(with some error checking).
I have no idea why sleep() was made to parse its arg in a locale
specific way, but that was done long long ago, and was (according
to the comments) done quite deliberately.
I think changing that decison (rather than just avoiding the problem,
as the current "fix" does) needs more discussion than a few comments
on the source-changes-d list.
kre
ps: "long long ago" means 1997 - this was added in version 1.10 of
sleep.c along with the comment explaining that it allows a locale
specific radix to be used. 1997 means this was in NetBSD 1.3 and
has been in all versions since. Even if we were to change that for
NetBSD 9, I don't think such an alteration should be done in a point
release, so we will need to make something deal with the problem
for 8.1
