Re: Default target wide character set

["Alexey Feldgendler" <alexeyf@opera.com>]

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:55:52 +0200, Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> wrote:

> I don't know your copyright assignment situation, but if you are
> planning to submit patches, it doesn't hurt to get started on that
> early.  Send me email off-list if you want to do this.

Sure, I'll make any small fix that makes sense on its own as a separate  
patch.

Alexey>> Side question: how does gdb figure out sizeof(wchar_t)? Does it
Alexey>> come from the symbol table or from elsewhere?

> Yeah, look in c-lang.c for a call to lookup_typename with an argument of
> "wchar_t".  The resulting type can be queried for its attributes.

What happens then no symbol table is available?

> What I would propose doing is adding a new charset named "UCS".  If this
> is selected as the target wide charset, then we would automatically pick
> UCS-2 or UCS-4 depending on sizeof(target wchar_t).  This would probably
> mean having a few special cases in the code (like we do for the -BE and
> -LE variants).  We would then make this the default target wide charset.
>
> What do you think of that?

I think it's a very good idea. Indeed, it's much more user-friendly to  
have an auto-sensing option with clearly defined semantics.

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:40:01 +0200, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> AFAIK, Windows (whose wchar_t is 16-bit) uses UTF-16, not UCS-2.
>
> What other platforms have a 16-bit wchar_t, and are you sure any
> significant portion of them use UCS-2 (which is an obsolete encoding,
> AFAIK)?

Because UCS-2 is a subset of UTF-16, it won't hurt to just change all uses  
of UCS-2 in gdb to UTF-16.

On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:46:30 +0200, Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> wrote:

> We could name it "auto" then.

I agree, and make it default.

Seems we agree here, I'll submit a patch soon.


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler
Software Developer, Desktop Team, Opera Software ASA
[ICQ: 115226275] http://my.opera.com/feldgendler/