Re: [PATCH] t4205: don't rely on en_US.UTF-8 locale existing

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk> writes:

> My system doesn't have the en_US.UTF-8 locale (or plain en_US), which
> causes t4205 to fail by counting bytes instead of UTF-8 codepoints.
>
> Instead of using sed for this, use Perl which behaves predictably
> whatever locale is in use.
>
> Signed-off-by: John Keeping <john@keeping.me.uk>
> ---
> This patch is on top of 'as/log-output-encoding-in-user-format'.

Thanks.  I think Alexey is going to send incremental updates to the
topic so I won't interfere by applying this patch on top of the
version I have in my tree.

But I do agree that using Perl may be a workable solution.

An alternative might be not to use this cryptic 3-arg form of
commit_msg at all.  They are used only for these three:

	$(commit_msg "" "8" "..*$")
	$(commit_msg "" "0" ".\{11\}")
	$(commit_msg "" "4" ".\{11\}")

I somehow find them simply not readable, in order to figure out what
is going on.

Just using three variables to hold what are expected would be far
more portable and readable.

# "anfänglich" whatever it means.
sample_utf8_part=$(printf "anf\303\244ng")

commit_msg () {
	msg="initial. ${sample_utf8_part}lich";
	if test -n "$1"
	then
		echo "$msg" | iconv -f utf-8 -t "$1"
	else
		echo "$msg"
        fi
}

And then instead of writing in the expected test output.

	$(commit_msg "" "8" "..*$")
	$(commit_msg "" "0" ".\{11\}")
	$(commit_msg "" "4" ".\{11\}")

we can just say

	initial...
        ..an${sample_utf8_part}lich
	init..lich

It is no worse than those cryptic 0, 4, 8 and 11 magic numbers we
see in the test, no?