On 19/07/2018 08:27, Xueming Shen wrote:
Hi Nasser,
From openjdk's perspective It would be preferred to direct the develop
to use the charset
implementation provided by IBM, or the reliable third party that has
the appropriate knowledge,
experience and resource to support/maintain those charsets such as the
icu4j charset
project. I have been pulling the data from that huge icu-charset-data
file and implement/maintain
them based on my best knowledge, but I'm sure engineers from IBM or
the icu project probably
can do a much better job to implement/maintain/update those charsets
going forward.
As first step we can separate those IBM charsets from the jdk.charset
into a separate package
somewhere and configure them to be built into java.base and
jdk.charsets, for aix platform only.
Then we can further discuss the best way to handle/distribute those
charsets that are not needed
for the java.base module (for vm startup). As I said, it would be
ideal if we can remove them from the
openjdk repo/binaries complete and direct the developer/user to use
the icu4j charset provider
for those encodings, when needed. But given the possible compatibility
concern, we might want to
phase this work out gradually in next major release.
I agree and in terms of phasing then I don't think it would be too
disruptive if the EBCDIC charsets were dropped from jdk.charsets in JDK
12, at least on the main stream platforms. As we've established in this
thread, the ICU4J project does seem to publish its charset provider to
Maven so there are alternatives for applications that really need these
charsets
Nasser - do you do any testing with the ICU4J charsets? I quickly tried
62.1 and it seems to work fine on the class path. I didn't check for any
compatibility differences or compare the performance but maybe you have.
It's a bit awkward to test this provider as an automatic module due to
the unusual naming of these JAR files. They may not have looked at
modules yet but the ability to link thee icu4h.charsets module into a
run-time image seems something that people may want to do in the future.
-Alan
