OS X Terminal Internationalization
I have a problem and I have high hopes that this might solve it. A little background is in order. To manage our internal documents we are using Subversion. Not only for development stuff but also for all other documents. The nice thing is that everything is versioned, backed up, and available from every pc. A small svn update, and all documents are up to date, a small svn commit with a comment and your new version is in. All cool.
On Windows, we don’t have a problem but on OS X there is one. The thing is that Subversion was done for development stuff and the shell is not really done for the average joe. There is a tool for OS X called svnX but that is really nothing more than a wrapper for the shell commands. The OS X shell is not properly internalized. The problem is that the German letters like üäö do not propperly work, and for business documents, this is something you use a lot. E.g. Founding would be called Gründung.
As the internationalization is not perfect, svn checkout will get the documents on your hard disk. After that is done you have one document that is called Gründung.doc for example. But when you do a ls, you will not get Gründung.doc but something like GruSOMETHINGndung.doc. When Subversion then does a status check it will tell you that you do not have Gründung.doc in your directory and a GruSOMETHINGndung.doc that does not have a status in the Subversion directory. As there are lots of documents with äöü you will have e.g. 30 documents that are not subversioned and 30 document that are missing.
Now that is a PAIN! And all tries to internationalize the shell have been unsuccessful. .profile now includes:
export LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8
export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Nothing. I also built a new bash from MacPorts. Nothing either. I would be happy for any suggestions.
Wow, I’m running up into the same problem. Please shoot me a note if you figure it out.
Good luck.
Sadly nobody has answered just yet.
See http://www.rift.dk/news.php?item.7.6
Apologies if some of the following seem obvious:
Check the following:
run “bash –version”.
Make sure it is v3.x.
Terminal/Preferences is pointing to the right bash (opt/local/bin).
Terminal/Window Settings/Display has Character Set Encoding set to Unicode.
Wide glyphs for Japanese/Chinese/etc. is checked.
Run “echo $LC_ALL” to make sure .profile is running. I found that if I had a .bash_login file in my home directory that .profile didn’t run unless I included a “source .profile” statement in the .bash_login file.
Upgrade coreutils. OS X 10.4.10’s coreutils doesn’t fully support UTF-8 (including ls). If subversion uses “ls” this could be a problem. The latest version on MacPorts is v6.9.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the tips, but sadly, doesn’t help.
oliver@oliver-thylmanns-computer ~ $ bash -version.
GNU bash, version 3.2.17(1)-release (i386-apple-darwin8.9.1)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
oliver@oliver-thylmanns-computer ~ $ echo $LC_ALL
de_DE.UTF-8
oliver@oliver-thylmanns-computer ~ $ ls –version
ls (GNU coreutils) 6.9
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Written by Richard Stallman and David MacKenzie.
oliver@oliver-thylmanns-computer ~ $
grr…
Well, at least it seems to be a known issue…
http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2464
Unfortunately, I’m not any closer to a solution… :-/