maxima pukes on non-ascii filenames (terrible evil bug! - caused by clisp?)

[williamstein]

> Do you have any files anywhere in your filesystem that might not
> just use standard ascii characters in their names?

> I'm guessing a bug in Maxima is causing the problem.  Maxima tries
> to read various directories on startup and behaves very stupidly in
> the presence of filenames that contain characters that confuse it.

> Could you try making a new clean user account and running
>     sage -maxima
> from it?

Thank you!! On a new user account sage and its maxima worked
beautifully.

On my main account I found a folder called "Steuerfälle" generated by
a governement-software for calculating the taxes in Switzerland... I
changed that -> issue gone.

Thank you very much, William. I'm looking forward to having a great
time with sage.

Component: packages: standard

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/2841

[sagetrac-cwitty]

comment:1

Note that this was previously reported (and fixed, at least for me) as #276.

Perhaps the bug reporter has LANG set to an encoding that does not handle that particular file name; or perhaps LANG is not set, and en_US.UTF-8 does not work on that machine (or at least, that file name is not a valid UTF-8 string).

[sagetrac-mabshoff]

comment:2

Well, this is actually likely to be a clisp issue, so hopefully once we switch to ecls this issue will be gone regardless if this is actually an env issue or not.

Cheers,

Michael

[kcrisman]

comment:3

Is this still an issue, given the comment above and #276, and the recent fix of ECL to not scan the filesystem (did that ever cause this problem? Changing to minor with no complaints like this in two years.

[kcrisman]

comment:4

Suggesting that we might make a change to sage-env if this isn't a problem anymore.

# If the language encoding isn't set, set it to be US, since 
# Sage is currently mainly a US program, and leaving this off 
# leads to some really confusing errors -- see trac #276 
 
if [ "$LANG" = "" ]; then 
    LANG="en_US.UTF-8"  && export LANG 
fi  

But Sage isn't anywhere near as much mainly a US program now, and hopefully this problem isn't possible anymore? I did create a folder called "Steuerfälle" on my computer and that didn't cause problems, and LANG=en_US.UTF-8 still (even when I open a new terminal window).

So perhaps we should revert #276 - or at least close this ticket!

[qed777]

comment:5

It appears that #2513 (changeset 1231:7ae8bf22920b in the scripts repository) has already reverted #276.

Should we wait for reports about non-ASCII file/folder names?

Recent sage-devel thread.

[kcrisman]

comment:6

Replying to @qed777:

It appears that #2513 (changeset 1231:7ae8bf22920b in the scripts repository) has already reverted #276.

Hilarious! Just goes to show that Sage is too big for any one person to know all about it - or at least to remember all tickets.

Should we wait for reports about non-ASCII file/folder names?

No - this should be pointed out as fixed elsewhere and the ticket closed, imho.

Recent sage-devel thread.

If you agree, then I would say just put a note to that effect on that thread.

[qed777]

comment:7

I'm closing this ticket as "invalid," since our Maxima no longer "pukes on non-ascii filenames." For background, see #276 and #2513.