Now, dear all,

IF you are not Felipe AND are not an_interesed_core_member
THEN disregard this mail completely and never open/use
attachments
ELSE proceed at your own risk!

What was/is my vision:

To enable Lazarus to produce Unicode-enabled Windows code
(if a developer wishes so and uses an appropriate ifdef)
which will sense if the runtime Win version supports Unicode
and - if so - will use Unicode, or - when not so - will
gracefully degrade to the target codepage.

What have I done:

No more than a few small steps in the direction of a proof
of concept. Please be aware that I...

* Have not thought about form saveing/loading or about
IDE/editor issues.
* Have not coded any support for correct handling of the
situation where the runtime Win does not support Unicode.
* Have not by any means devised a final declaration of
basic coding/decoding functions.
* Have just created a bit of a Unicode-support for Form,
Button, Label and (only partially) Edit.
* Have added tons of debugging lines which will indeed not be
needed (and are even now mostly not needed any more) in the
final version (if any).
* Have not performed extensive and organised tests.
* Have neither deleted some dead comments, nor beautified
my code.

You should *NEVER EVER* try to:

* install the attached patch as a permanent patch
* rebuild the whole Lazarus with -dUseWin32u
and/or -dVerboseWin32u

What you can try:

* Test the patch (procedure described under
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Creating_A_Patch - see
--dry-run) - I have never tried that, so, Felipe and
others, make sure that you will be able to retreat!
* Define in configure-build-Lazarus that you want to build
only LCL and do nothing with other parts; define
-dUseWin32u -dUNICODE  in Options there; build Lazarus (i.e.
only LCL) in that way
(see
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/How_To_Help_Developing_Lazarus#Widgetsets_.28.22interfaces.22.29
 )
* Build the small separately attached testing example
* Play with it
* If interested, maybe later use -dVerboseWin32u and rebuild
LCL with it and play with it
* Discuss the possible future directions (including the
possibility of abandoning my approach altogether, of course,
if too complex/unnecessary) on the list

Borut

Attachment: UnicodeWin_Experiment_Patch_20061016.rar
Description: Binary data

Attachment: TestUnicode_20061016.rar
Description: Binary data

Reply via email to