Locale and strerror in libgcj's native code...

Wed Aug 11 17:18:00 GMT 2004

In several places within the native code in libgcj, we have constructs
like this:
throw new IOException (JvNewStringUTF (strerror (errno)));
or
throw new IOException (JvNewStringLatin1 (strerror (errno)));
According to my reading of the man pages, strerror returns a string
according to the LC_MESSAGES encoding.
This means that the actual encoding is not known until runtime. So at
compile time it is impossible to know which JvNewString* function to
use. It seems to me that using a mix (as we currently do) is clearly
wrong and only works in with ASCII encoding.
Perhaps we should have a JvNewStringLocale(const char *) that assumes
the encoding is as specified by LC_MESSAGES.
For the time being, I am using JvNewStringUTF as that seems to be what
my Fedora Core 1 system defaults to.
David Daney.