[OmniOS-discuss] Caiman issues with certain timezones

[Jim Klimov]

8 апреля 2016 г. 2:58:15 CEST, Dan McDonald <danmcd at omniti.com> пишет:
>A repeating problem has been with the ISO/USB "Caiman" installer
>barfing out upon selecting a timezone in Europe, Asia, or Africa.  All
>of these have timezones that use non-ASCII characters in one of their
>zone names.
>
>I've finally (and sorry for the delay) worked out a solution:  Have the
>installer run with LANG=en_US.UTF-8, so it can handle the characters. 
>The problem is, caiman's display doesn't cope with it very well, and
>draws letters where there used to be line/drawing characters.
>
>So my quick question to you all:  for r151018 (and backporting), do you
>prefer a nicer-looking installer that craps out if you select Africa,
>Europe, or Asia?  Or do you prefer a sketchier-looking one that works
>for all timezones out of the box?  I'm cutting the last 017 bloody with
>this, so you can try it out yourself when it shows up.
>
>Some people set their timezones in /etc/default/init AFTER
>installation, so I'm asking, instead of just making the decision.  I'm
>attaching a screenshot of the en_US.UTF-8 one.  Note the letter q where
>there should be a left-to-right bar:
>
>
>
>Dan
>
>
>
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Certainly you can also iconv the timezone files back to ASCII to chop off the diacritics, as they were until a couple years ago when somebody decided UTF would be a good idea? ;) That's what my build scripts did when updating timezones on older solaris/linux setups.

And beware of the 'factory' (iirc) timezone that does not pass the project's own schema verification (too long to be an abbreviation) - so might be nice to trim or exclude it during a conversion pass.

As for the installer - you might convert it to use ASCII bars, pluses and minuses? Midnight Commander might be an inspiration, they often have to solve similar problems. Although "qqqq" lines happen to pop up in bad combinations of heuristics and locales.

HTH, Jim
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