[25496] in Athena Bugs
linux 9.2.27: iconv and i18n
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Wed Feb 11 13:46:10 2004
Message-Id: <200402111845.i1BIjvhK007856@well.mit.edu>
To: bugs@mit.edu
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 13:45:56 -0500
From: "Jacob Morzinski" <jmorzins@mit.edu>
cc: jmorzins@mit.edu
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
System name: well.mit.edu
Type and version: i686 9.2.27
Display type: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x (rev 64)
Shell: /bin/sh
Window manager: sawfish
What were you trying to do?
Read the utmp manpage.
What's wrong:
% man utmp
iconv: illegal input sequence at position 1409
Tracing through the problem shows that the root of the
issue is a missing /etc/sysconfig/i18n file.
What should have happened:
nroff is the program that is erroring out - it is unable
to deal with 8-bit characters present in the manpage.
It is possible to workaround the issue by giving a
setenv LANG en_US.UTF-8
command before running man (nroff).
Please describe any relevant documentation references:
Many of Athena's Linux machines don't set LANG.
My sample set of machines is small: my private
workstation (well.mit.edu) and one sipb linux machine
(zsr.mit.edu) do not set LANG. A third sipb linux
machine, quiche.mit.edu does set LANG.
The deciding factor for whether LANG gets set is whether
the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n exists. (On startup, csh
sources /etc/csh.cshrc which reads /etc/profile.d/lang.csh
which reads /etc/sysconfig/i18n). Given that system
manpages require the file, it may be worth putting it on
all machines.
I do not know why some machines have the i18n file while
other machines lack it.
