On Thu, 4 Jun 2009, Pierre Ossman wrote:
Has anyone done a survey of how implementations treat this extension and the name field in the server init? If there are no existing implementations that prevent it, then I'd like to specify UTF-8 for at least the extension.
...
So to summarise, the only part that has some idea of what encoding it wants is the Unix client. Everything else is basically random and dependent on the system settings. ASCII should be fairly safe to use, but I'm not 100% sure of even that.Given that most of the systems (except for the Unix server) have been using 8859-1 (or cp1252, which is close) in practice, I'd say we define the desktop name to be 8859-1 and nothing else.
(In the discussion below, I'm talking about both the DesktopName pseudo-encoding as well as the name-string in ServerInit.)
Good investigation, but I disagree with your conclusion. We all want to move to UTF-8, and since the spec doesn't say anything about the encoding today, we are free to do this, and we should take this opportunity. There might be a small migration pain now, but I think we can live with that. The alternative, living with Latin1 "forever", isn't tempting.
I believe that in practice, the number of people actually *using* desktop names with Latin1 characters outside ASCII is extremely small:
* The UNIX server, as you point out, typically "generates" UTF-8 names.* The Windows servers (at least RealVNC, TightVNC 1.5, TigerVNC) doesn't actually allow setting the desktop name through the GUI. Instead, it uses the string "VNC: <computername>". The computername, in turn, is restricted to ASCII.
Also, when DesktopName was created, we actually discussed about using UTF-8, from the beginning.
Finally, here's what James Weatherall <jnw <at> realvnc.com> said about it (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.vnc.realvnc.general/25076):
"In practice desktop names are currently ASCII-only, but new standard RFB protocol elements all use UTF-8 for string data. I'd recommend that third-party encodings, etc also use UTF-8 for string data for consistency."
Rgds, ---
Peter Åstrand ThinLinc Chief Developer Cendio AB http://www.cendio.com Wallenbergs gata 4 583 30 Linköping Phone: +46-13-21 46 00
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