pkg_alternatives, Darwin and locale

[Louis Guillaume <lguillaume%berklee.edu@localhost>]

Hi,

It seems that pkg_alternatives breaks on Darwin if the locale is 
anything but "C".  This is because the negation symbol (¬) is used as a 
delimiter and for some reason (bug or other) tr on Darwin can't deal 
with that in a en_US locale. sed has problems too.

For example, on Mac OS X...

$ locale
LANG="en_US"
LC_COLLATE="en_US"
LC_CTYPE="en_US"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
LC_MONETARY="en_US"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
LC_TIME="en_US"
LC_ALL=

$ ruby --version
tr: Illegal byte sequence
ruby (wrapper): no alternatives found

$ export LC_ALL="C"
$ ruby --version
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-06-20 patchlevel 22) [i386-darwin9]

It seems like a problem on Darwin, because I've tested the same on AIX, 
Linux and NetBSD.

While trying to reproduce this on NetBSD, I noticed that setting LC_ALL 
doesn't appear to update all of the LC_ environment variables as it does 
on other systems. Not sure if this is intentional or what.

Anyway might it be better for pkg_alternatives to use an ASCII character 
for this in case older systems' tr or sed etc. don't understand >7-bit 
characters?

Who knows when Apple will fix this? Maybe we can't wait!

Louis