#410083 perl: cpan should use locales at run time for output

Package:
perl
Source:
perl
Description:
Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language
Submitter:
Vincent Lefevre
Date:
2010-11-09 12:36:04 UTC
Severity:
minor
#410083#5
Date:
2007-02-07 15:42:17 UTC
From:
To:
When running cpan for the first time, one gets a series of questions,
in particular:

  The next option deals with the charset your terminal supports. In
  general CPAN is English speaking territory, thus the charset does not
  matter much, but some of the aliens out there who upload their
  software to CPAN bear names that are outside the ASCII range. If your
  terminal supports UTF-8, you say no to the next question, if it
  supports ISO-8859-1 (also known as LATIN1) then you say yes, and if it
  supports neither nor, your answer does not matter, you will not be
  able to read the names of some authors anyway. If you answer no, names
  will be output in UTF-8.

  Your terminal expects ISO-8859-1 (yes/no)? [yes]

However the user may want to use several locales (e.g. an ISO-8859-1
terminal and later, a UTF-8 terminal). An encoding fixed in some config
file will lead to a buggy behavior in this case. The correct way to do
is to use the locales to determine the output encoding (at run time).
#410083#10
Date:
2010-11-09 12:33:53 UTC
From:
To:
tag 410083 upstream confirmed
thanks

Upstream is aware of this. Since 5.10.0 or so, the corresponding variable
has been deprecated with this note in the documentation:

  Note: this config variable is deprecated and will be removed in a
  future version of CPAN.pm. It will be replaced with the conventions
  around the family of $LANG and $LC_* environment variables.