Aven crashes on macOS 27 — locale workaround

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 11:02:05PM +0100, Olly Betts via Survex wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 08:27:42AM +0200, Darek Lubomski wrote:
> > I ran the following tests myself. Here is the raw terminal output:
> [...]
> 
> OK, so it seems to affect all translations except en_US (which is a
> translation for Survex as the base messages are en_GB but presumably
> macOS uses en_US as its base so it's probably handled much like "C"
> there).

I found https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/issues/26977 which seems
like it could well be the same problem.  Apparently the problem is
a macOS bug with locales where the decimal separator is a comma, which
fits your observations.

Ideally Apple will fix it quickly, though people commenting on that
ticket suspect it's a low priority for them.

Maybe we can just not set the locale explicitly on macOS.  That would
probably break the ability to specify a different language for
messages to that the OS is set to, but that's better than crashing or
having to force English messages.

The wxLocale docs suggest using wxUILocale instead for apps which
target macOS due to various bugs in previous macOS releases.  We'd need
to then use wxTranslations for the wx messages it seems.

That's probably not going to be a quick fix though, especially as I
don't have a Mac for testing on.

Cheers,
    Olly