[BlueOnyx:15069] YUM updates for 5106R/5107R/5108R

[Michael Stauber]

Hi all,

I just published a fairly comprehensive update for 5106R/5107R/5108R:

============================
 Package
============================
Updating:
 base-admserv-capstone
 base-admserv-glue
 base-email-capstone
 base-email-glue
 base-email-locale-da_DK
 base-email-locale-de_DE
 base-email-locale-en_US
 base-email-locale-es_ES
 base-email-locale-fr_FR
 base-email-locale-it_IT
 base-email-locale-ja_JP
 base-email-locale-nl_NL
 base-email-locale-pt_PT
 base-email-ui
 base-swupdate-capstone
 base-swupdate-glue
 base-swupdate-locale-da_DK
 base-swupdate-locale-de_DE
 base-swupdate-locale-en_US
 base-swupdate-locale-es_ES
 base-swupdate-locale-fr_FR
 base-swupdate-locale-it_IT
 base-swupdate-locale-ja_JP
 base-swupdate-locale-nl_NL
 base-swupdate-locale-pt_PT
 base-swupdate-ui
 sausalito-i18n
 sausalito-i18n-devel
 sausalito-palette

Transaction Summary
============================
Install       0 Package(s)
Upgrade      30 Package(s)

Total download size: 13 M

This update has the purpose to fully switch the GUI to UTF-8 encoding
for all languages. Including Japanese.

During the large update in December I only managed to get it done
through some dirty work arounds that involved using incorrect charsets
for UTF-8 encoded pages (such as "windows-1252"). Which in the end
created more problems than it solved. Especially for things such as
vacation messages that contain kanji characters, umlauts or accents. Two
subsequent updates were released to address this, but it was still a
kludge. This times it ought to work better.

For those who know a bit PHP, here is the problem: PHP can handle UTF-8.
But to actually render PHP pages in UTF-8 correctly you need a slightly
tweaked Apache config that allows UTF-8, too. And you also need to
configure php.ini to use UTF-8 instead of the default ISO-8859-1 for
internal handling and encodings. Even then I had to jump through a few
loops with Japanese.

Approximately four hours ago I published these changes for all
platforms. I had tested them on 5108R, where they worked fine. After
releasing the updates I YUM updated a 5106R and noticed that all locales
but English were broken.

It took another four hours to fix that. So if your 5106R is set to
non-English and you see garbage characters in the GUI, do another "yum
clean all" and "yum update" and it'll be good.

The problems on 5106R were attributed to the fact that PHP-5.1.6 is even
less capable of handling pure UTF-8. For example it can't use keys that
have non-ASCII characters in certain object oriented contexts. Also
mb_detect_encoding() and mb_convert_encoding() produce different results
on PHP-5.3.3 than they deliver on PHP-5.1.6.

This update should also fix the issue that the non-English login page
showed these garbage characters instead of the proper text.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber