On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 03:20:10PM +0200, Pavel Tsekov wrote: > Lack of UTF-8 support is a big minus on the part of MC, but I think that > your statement is a bit overestimated. It's more like MC is not following the > latest trend, IMO.
I wouldn't call it 'trend'. Having splash screens, animated widgets, translucent windows, using ajax on the web, blogging etc etc etc. are trends. UTF-8 is the one and only known and sane way of handling all the non-english scripts, hence it's a technical decision. Moreover, mc not supporting UTF-8 doesn't just mean "it doesn't follow trends", it means it's not _working_ correctly in most Linux systems - and that's more serious. As said, modern distros use UTF-8. If you switch back to an 8-bit locale just for mc, you'll have troubles with your text files' content, with filenames etc. - mc will not be compatible with all the other apps. If you switch back globally for your system, you'll only be able to use a very small subset of non-English letters, and you'll still have problems (e.g. when editing .desktop files, using Gtk2 file browser windows etc). If you think of it from a user's point of view, this whole story is simply about "just works" vs. anything else. Obviously vast majority of the users want applications and accented/CJK/etc letters to "just work". > I haven't looked at the UTF-8 patch recently (but I will) so I cannot > comment it. Do you think that UTF-8 patch 'as is' is the right way to > implement UTF-8 for MC ? Not the right way in the long term. But maybe it's better in short term than nothing at all - I don't know. > And what about ncurses - it is my opinion > that it must not be dropped in favor of S-Lang... I agree, and I know it still needs some work... The whole UTF-8 story has been discussed here many times... at this moment my goal is not to implement it or to ask you to merge the patches upstream, I only wanted to bring your attention to this problem and hence ask you to stick to 4.6.x version numbers. But it's just an opinion, the choice is yours. -- Egmont _______________________________________________ Mc-devel mailing list http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
