[Rd] Installation failure in non-UTF-8 MBCS locale

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 10/16/22 19:35, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
> I am sorry, part of the output is garbled, as the email's encoding is
> different, but the error is hopefully still clear.
>
> This is Ubuntu 20.04, yesterday's R devel or R release, in the zh_CN locale.
>
> The zh_CN.UTF-8 locale is fine, and it is a much better option, so I
> am not sure if this is considered to be a bug.

Right, one should use UTF-8 (on all platforms) as the locale encoding.

For historical reasons, one can still parse UTF-8 when R is running e.g. 
in Latin 1 locale. This is still supported as older Windows systems 
don't use UTF-8 as the native encoding, yet.

When R runs in a non-UTF-8 multi-byte locale, it cannot parse UTF-8 R 
input files. This is due to how the parser works and supporting that 
would require a major rewrite which would not be worth the effort 
(instead effort has been spent on supporting UTF-8 as the native 
encoding on Windows).

Best
Tomas

>
>> install.packages("evaluate")
> ����������װ��'/root/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.3'
> (��Ϊ'lib'û�б�ָ��)
> �Կ�URL��https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/all/__linux__/focal/latest/src/contrib/evaluate_0.17.tar.gz'
> Content type 'binary/octet-stream' length 25984 bytes (25 KB)
> ==================================================
> downloaded 25 KB
>
> * installing *source* package 'evaluate' ...
> ** �ɹ���'evaluate'������������MD5�ͼ���
> ** using staged installation
> Warning in parse(con, encoding = "UTF-8") :
>    argument encoding="UTF-8" is ignored in MBCS locales
> Error : invalid multibyte character in parser (<input>:11:32)
> ERROR: installing package DESCRIPTION failed for package 'evaluate'
> * removing '/root/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.3/evaluate'
>
> ���صij�������
> '/tmp/Rtmp3O0zlO/downloaded_packages'��
> Warning message:
> In install.packages("evaluate") : ��װ������'evaluate'ʱ�˳�??��ֵ����0
>
> R-release produces the same error.
>
> Dockerfile to reproduce this:
>
> FROM ubuntu:20.04
> RUN apt-get -y update && apt-get -y install curl locales
> RUN curl -Ls https://github.com/r-lib/rig/releases/download/latest/rig-linux-latest.tar.gz
> | tar xz -C /usr/local
> RUN rig add devel
> RUN rig add release
> RUN locale-gen zh_CN
> RUN uname -a
> RUN R -q -e 'sessionInfo()'
> RUN LC_ALL=zh_CN R -q -e 'install.packages("evaluate")'
>
> G.
>
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