Re: [PATCH RFC] Character set support

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com>]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 12:11:42PM -0700, Kevin Buettner wrote:
> On Sep 13,  2:42pm, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> 
> > > On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 12:02:29PM -0500, Jim Blandy wrote:
> > > 
> > >> Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com> writes:
> > > 
> > >> > I'm not suggesting reading wchar_t's from the target; that's not
> > >> > terribly useful a thing to do.  You _want_ the host wchar_t.  It is
> > >> > a host type capable of holding a wide character; the type changes
> > >> > based on platform and on whether or not the platform actually has
> > >> > wide character support.
> > > 
> > >> If you're suggesting using the host's wchar_t to hold characters after
> > >> conversion from the target charset to the host charset, then I'm with
> > >> you.
> > >> 
> > >> If you're suggesting using the host's wchar_t to hold character values
> > >> that have been read from the target, but not yet converted to the
> > >> host's charset, then I really disagree.  The target's wchar_t could be
> > >> 32 bits, while the host's might be 16 bits.
> > > 
> > > Precisely.  I was suggesting using host wchar_t after conversion to
> > > host format.
> > 
> > Sounds like we need a WCHAREST :-)
> 
> Yes, or something equivalent.
> 
> What I'd like to determine is whether Daniel thinks that the notion of
> a wchar_t *must* be added to Jim's work before the patch can go in. 
> (IMO, the wchar_t changes should be done as an incremental improvement.)

Certainly not; sorry if I gave that impression.  I think we should take
it as-is now, and then try to find someone with better i18n experience
to make it multibyte-friendly; Debian usually has an excess of such
people, so I'll go looking later :)

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer