[Xastir] xastir strange behaviour

[Tom Russo]

The character 260 thing is a known bug that was introduced when the Greek
language was added to Xastir's language options -- prior to that, Xastir
always set two locale settings (LC_NUMERIC and LC_CTYPE) unconditionally to
the "C" locale, whereas now it only sets these two things for specific uses
and then resets them to the default locale that was in effect when the program 
started (which, on most Linux systems is something like en_US.utf8 or 
something like it).

This has caused a number of problems that have not all been sorted out.  I 
managed to find a number of places where the setting of LC_NUMERIC and LC_TYPE
had been overlooked, but I did not get them all -- on my system, I don't
see any such warning messages anymore, and cannot debug further.

However, if you were to clear the LANG setting (or set it to "C") you might
see these problems go away.  Try invoking Xastir from the command line using
the following command:
   env LANG="" xastir&
or
   env LANG="C" xastir &
This should stop the "character 260" warnings, but may cause other problems.

Watch to see if the strange characters in your TNC data window show up.  If so,
we've got more data about what's wrong with the Greek patches.

In the past, I saw other problems crop up by setting "LANG=C" this way, such
as certain dialog boxes not working anymore on my Ubuntu system.  Since we've
had recent reports of Ubuntu breakage in the message entry dialog, I am 
strongly suspecting that this LANG/locale thing is at the root of a lot of
current evils.

I'm not about to say that we should back out all the changes that were made
to support Greek (since someone worked pretty hard to get those working), but
perhaps it was premature to push them to master.  It might be necessary to
relegate them to a branch for further study.

On Wed, Dec 05, 2018 at 07:03:45PM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <joe at laferla.ca> flavor, containing:
> Hi David
> 
> I wonder if this is it because I just checked my terminal window and there are many instances of the following error warning
> 
> 
> Warning
> Name
> Class
> Character /260 not supported in font.  Discarded.
> 
> This is repeater many times each time with a different name.  I don???t know how to fix it though.  As I mentioned in my earlier post I did do a xastir upgrade and apt-get upgrade.  One thing though, this problem  only happens with the tnc packet data.  If I select net data only then all the stations come in perfectly as always.
> 
> Joe
> VA3JLF
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sent from Mail for Windows 10
> 
> From: David Ranch
> Sent: Wednesday, December 5, 2018 11:14 AM
> To: Xastir - APRS client software discussion
> Subject: Re: [Xastir] xastir strange behaviour
> 
> Hello Joe,
> 
> That link works.  So is your issue the strange characters and the 
> excessive CR/LFs in the "Display Packet Data" box?  If so, that smacks 
> of a font problem.  Did you recently update your OS and it included 
> various fonts or Xserver updates?  Maybe you can choose a different font 
> or possibly rebuild your font cache?  I remember seeing posts on this 
> list about font issues maybe a year ago.
> 
> --David
> KI6ZHD
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-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY
Tijeras, NM  

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