Repair of sabotaged mathematical glyphs in certain Linux distros.

Recently, I received a tip that some Linux users saw rubbish in place of certain Unicode glyphs appearing in the FFA series (in particular, in Ch. 14.)

If the following two rows of symbols do not appear recognizably-identical in your WWW browser:


← → ⇠ ⇢ ⌊ ⌋

utf test

... the following fix is likely to cure:


... on Gentoo-derived Linuxen:

emerge media-fonts/dejavu


... on Arch-derived Linuxen:

pacman -S ttf-dejavu


Anyone who has witnessed the above dysfunction, or knows the details of when and why this astonishing breakage was introduced, the systems affected, the identities of the perpetrators, or anything else pertinent -- is invited to write in.

This entry was written by Stanislav , posted on Thursday March 04 2021 , filed under Chumpatronics, Cold Air, FFA, Friends, Gentoo, Mathematics, SoftwareArchaeology, SoftwareSucks . Bookmark the permalink . Post a comment below or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

3 Responses to “Repair of sabotaged mathematical glyphs in certain Linux distros.”

  • spyked says:

    Stan, regarding your woes with the Loper OS feed in #asciilifeform: while my browser is loading your ?feed=rss feed without trouble through a redirect to ?feed=rss2, certain libraries (including curl and drakma) have trouble getting that for some reason which I'm too lazy to dig into.

    Example from one of my boxes:

    $ curl 'http://www.loper-os.org/?feed=rss' | xxd
      % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                     Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
    100     2    0     2    0     0      2      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     4
    0000000: 0a0a

    I changed the RSS link from ?feed=rss to ?feed=rss2, this should fix the problem.

    • Stanislav says:

      Dear Spyked,

      Thanks for looking into it. The given hypothesis still does not explain, though, why the feed worked correctly in #spyked. (I did fiddle with the PHPisms recently, and perhaps broke something. But the result is still puzzling.)

      Yours,
      -S

      • spyked says:

        #s is using the ?feed=rss2 link, which is grabbed correctly by Drakma, so I'm confident the change will fix the problem for #a.

        There's no consistency whatsoever in the way RSS resources are handled by Feedbot: "site/feed" and "site/feed/" will be handled as separate feeds, without any regard to the fact that they point to the same resource. So when I started testing the bot in #s I used ?feed=rss2, then when I installed the bot in #a I used the links in the list. I recently did a pass through dead feeds that were slowing down checking, but this didn't raise any flags until now.

        If it helps any with the user-facing side of Feedbot, I could open access to in-channel commands for +v users, or just for you, whichever works best for you.

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