Re: strange regression failure

Tom Lane wrote:

>Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>
>
>>Has anyone got any idea on why I see things like this from time to time?
>>It seems to be intermittent, which is odd.
>>
>>
>
>I have a suspicion that the unexpected result occurs when the client
>encoding is UTF8, because psql/mbprint.c's ucs_wcwidth() function goes
>belly up on control characters (which it probably shouldn't; for that
>matter, that entire file should be removed and replaced with our real
>multibyte support...).
>
>

Well, based on your recent classification of the TODO list as items that
are either very hard or that noone wants to do, perhaps it deserves an
entry ;-)

>What's not apparent is why the failure wouldn't be consistent. You'd
>think the buildfarm would always run the test with the same encoding
>selection. Any idea how that might not happen?
>
>
>
>

No. buildfarm itself does nothing to set the encoding for either the
server or the client. I guess we should make sure to use C/SQL_ASCII as
the locale/encoding settings when we initdb after the temp install.
Right now any environment settings inherited by the script are passed
through. I guess for the sake of completeness I should also set
PGCLIENTENCODING.

But I too find the inconsistency a mystery. I have seen ity once on my
test machine (dog) here:
http://www.pgbuildfarm.org/cgi-bin/show_log.pl?nm=dog&dt=2004-11-30%2019:22:01

The time suggests that unlike my usual tests which are run from cron at
6 minutes past the hour this one was probably run by hand from the
command line for some reason, where I have LANG set to "en_US.UTF-8" -
don't know if that makes a difference.

cheers

andrew