Re: strange regression failure

Tom Lane wrote:

>Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.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