Re: [PATCH RFC] Character set support

Daniel Jacobowitz
2002-09-13T00:41:49Z

On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 05:30:56PM -0700, Kevin Buettner wrote:
> Jim Blandy is the author of the patch below. I have looked it over
> though and it looks reasonable to me. Also, I have tested Jim's work
> and see no regressions nor any new failures as a result of the tests
> that Jim has added.
>
> I have tried to think of ways to break these changes up so that they
> may be committed it in smaller sections. With the exception of
> possible separate commits for the documentation and testsuite
> portions, I can't think of any further divisions which make sense.
>
> I'll wait a week for comments after which time, if there are no
> objections, I'll commit it.

Two comments:
There's a lot of passing integers around to refer to a character.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me; we should either be passing
char *, so that we can decode multibyte sequences, or using wchar_t
explicitly and autoconfing for it.

I see hardcoded support for a couple of simplistic charsets; would it
be worthwhile to add (minimal!) support for UTF-8 in case iconv is not
available? Gcj is natively UTF-8, and I have some open Debian bug
reports about this.

I flinch at the tables but they seem like the only reasonable approach.
I've only skimmed the rest, but it looks reasonable to me.

--
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer