Nicolas Williams wrote: > On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 01:04:30PM -0700, Jordan Brown (Sun) wrote: > > The real answer is that everybody should always use UTF-8... > > Yes, but... > > The real answer is that everybody should have been using UTF-8 for the > past 40 years or so.
Groan... I said this elsewhere... each generation of software engineer has it's own "ultimate" language encoding system... remeber when ISO2022 was "cool" in the last decade ? Now we have Unicode which is "cool". And maybe the next decade will have it's own cool encoding system (maybe called "interCode" or "iCode" ?). In any case it was IMO not a good idea to make the output of "svcprop" unicode-specific where it may have been better to just use the standard multibyte API and handle the possible "loss" of information differently. "svcprop" may currently have no "dataloss"[1] problem but any possible real-world consumer will have a problem. And that's very bad... [1]=(which isn't completely correct since Unicode is _not_ a lossless encoding (e.g. see unicode's han unification system (which may lead to some ambiguity if you mix some asian languages))) > Seriously. We have non-UTF-8 locales. We might be able to EOF some of > them (e.g., all the ISO-8859 locales), but not all of them, ... like zh_CN.GB18030 (which is _MANDATORY_ for china (assuming you want goverment contracts)) and ja_JP.PCK (which is more or less unavoidable for japanese installations in the next ten or twenty years) > and we can't > actually remove any of them any time soon. So non-UTF-8 locales are > here for the forseeable future and we have to deal. Right... and IMO it may not be a good idea to hardcode every API to unicode without adding options for alternatives (e.g. an encoding identifer, file format version number etc.) ... as I said there may be a new one in twenty years. The current version of Unicode isn't completely undisputed (see "tron"&co.) ... ---- Bye, Roland -- __ . . __ (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090 (;O/ \/ \O;)
