Locale Collation Differences Can Silently Break CI Builds Using Glob Patterns
A subtle but critical build issue arises when shell glob patterns like 'fragments/*.json' expand files in collation order, which varies across locales such as en_US.UTF-8 and C. This means a concatenation script written on a Linux machine may produce a different file order — and a different checksum — than the same script run on macOS or a CI runner. The discrepancy causes checksum validation failures even when all files are present, making the bug appear like a flaky test when it is actually a deterministic environment mismatch. AI-generated scripts worsen the problem by defaulting to short, unquoted globs without documenting the locale dependency. The recommended fix is to use an explicit file manifest and pin LC_ALL=C in any script that relies on file ordering, rather than assuming the runtime environment will match the development machine.
This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.
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