some issues with BuildSystem and LANG

[Lisandro Dalcin]

Today I had a hard time helping a student trying to build PETSc on a
Ubuntu box he has at home... For some unknow reason, the configure
step let pass '-PIC' as a valid GCC flag... The relevant parts of the
configure log are shown below... (the <...> represent uninteresting
output)

TEST checkPIC from
config.setCompilers(/home/nisi/petsc-3.0.0-p5/config/BuildSystem/config/setCompilers.py:807)
TESTING: checkPIC from
config.setCompilers(config/BuildSystem/config/setCompilers.py:807)
  Determine the PIC option for each compiler
       - There needs to be a test that checks that the functionality
is actually working
        Pushing language C
      Trying C compiler flag -PIC
<.....>
sh: gcc  -o conftest  -PIC    conftest.o
Executing: gcc  -o conftest  -PIC    conftest.o
sh:
Possible ERROR while running linker: gcc: no se reconoce la opción '-PIC'
 output: error message = {gcc: no se reconoce la opción '-PIC'
}
<.....>
        Valid C linker flag -PIC
      Adding C compiler flag -PIC
sh: gcc -c -o conftest.o  -PIC   conftest.c
Executing: gcc -c -o conftest.o  -PIC   conftest.c
sh:
Possible ERROR while running compiler: error message = {gcc: no se
reconoce la opción '-PIC'
}
<.....>
Added C compiler flag -PIC

What's going on?? My guess was that BuildSystem is not prepared for
Spanish words :-)

I asked the guy to start the whole process again, but this time begin doing:

$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

and now things worked out of the box...

Is this  issue documented somewhere? There is anything we can do to
improve this? What is the minimal Python version BuildSystem should
require? Scanning stdout/stderr for guessing failures is really
fragile...



-- 
Lisandro Dalcín
---------------
Centro Internacional de Métodos Computacionales en Ingeniería (CIMEC)
Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química (INTEC)
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)
PTLC - Güemes 3450, (3000) Santa Fe, Argentina
Tel/Fax: +54-(0)342-451.1594