Re: [PATCH RFC] Character set support

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

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