Subject: Re: Bug#431231: tr fails with UTF-8

From: [email-masked] (Bob Proulx)
Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 15:33:12 -0600

merge 431231 139861
thanks

Juhapekka Tolvanen wrote:
> ...report of a locale problem in tr deleted...

See also these related issues.

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=139861
  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=388689

It is a known deficiency in coreutils in general that the utilities
are not multibyte aware.  The following can be found in the upstream
source package TODO file.

  Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
    multibyte aware.  The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
    significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
    (preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.

Some vendors have hacked in patches to make the utilities multibyte
aware but none of those patches have been considered clean enough to
incorporate into the upstream source yet.  Debian's maintainer has
stated that he does not want to diverge from upstream this radically.
The patches are very messy and incomplete.  The best course of action
would be to get this resolved upstream with the functionally properly
integrated.

Bob