> Ehsan - are you thinking about adding glibc collation to the
> strings/ctype-MYSET.c file? Or something more fundemental?

Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not really sure, since I've not checked the
MySQL source tree yet.  But yes, I'm going to see if glibc support can be
incorporated into MySQL's charset handling mechanism.

> I think you and the team I'm working with are trying to do
> the same thing - it would be great if we could work together
> and come up with a solution that anyone else can use too.

I looked around a bit, and it seems like MySQL 4.1.x will be supporting
UTF-8.  MySQL 4.0.x doesn't have that support (the version I'm using on the
production server is 4.0.18-standard.)  Because of that, incorporating that
support into MySQL might require a lot more work that I currently imagine.
Unfortunately in that case, I'll have to leave MySQL as it is, and sort the
data at the client site (less efficient, but requiring less development
time), and since the application I'm working on doesn't store very big
chunks of data in the db, I may decide to sacrifice performance for
development time.

> What's involved in creating a collation file? These two pages:
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Adding_character_set.html
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Character_arrays.html
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/String_collating.html
> seem to say that's it's not too difficult, if you know what
> you're doing?
> (Which I dont. I'm just a humble PHP programmer)

Well, that seems to be for single-byte code pages.  The Persian character
coding system used in glibc is UTF-8, and that will require patching MySQL
source code.  And like I said, because of MySQL's lack of UTF-8 support, it
might require more work that I imagine.  I think I can handle it from
technical point of view (I'm good at C/C++) but I'm quite pressed in free
time...

> ... it seems it would be great to create a mySql Persian
> collation file rather than changing the source, with all the
> problems that would lead to of having to re-patch the code
> everytime there's a new MySql release? Or is that inevitable?

Well, if we decide to change the MySQL source code, we can submit our
patches to MySQL team, and hopefully they will incorporate it into their new
releases.  Of course in that case we might have to look into adding that
support to MySQL 4.1.x as well (if it already doesn't have.)  So there's no
need for re-patching.  There's just a need for time!  :-)

In case I decide not to spend the time in the development of Persian
collation support in MySQL, I'll be glad to help your team in case they need
technical programming help.  In that case, I'll let you know off-list
(remind me if you don't get any note from me within a week, please.)


-------------
Ehsan Akhgari

Farda Technology (http://www.farda-tech.com/)

[ Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
[ WWW: http://www.beginthread.com/Ehsan ]



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