From: Brian Candler <lists@...>
Date: 2012-05-16T22:02:02+09:00
Subject: Re: A million reasons why Encoding was a mistake

I will add that the OP is not entirely alone in his opinion.

The issue is not so much that radiant is broken, but that ruby 1.9 is. 
It has both a broken philosophy (that strings of bytes should always be 
treated as characters in some dynamic encoding) and a half-baked 
implementation (e.g. which can't convert accented characters from 
uppercase to lowercase). There also remains a total lack of official 
specification or documentation. I speak as someone who has attempted to 
reverse-engineer it.

As for "there is a set of simple rules to make your work on 1.9.3 
painless", what this really is saying is "to make your program run 
reliably under ruby 1.9 you have to do magic incantations W, X, Y and 
Z", none of which was necessary in ruby 1.8. What's worse is that 
without these incantations, your app or library or test suite may run 
just fine on your machine, but crash on someone else's, as illustrated 
by the OP.

With ruby 1.9, writing correct programs and giving them sufficient test 
coverage is more work than it was before. Do you run your test suite 
multiple times with different settings of LC_ALL in the environment? If 
not, you should.

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