Using UTF-8 as host charset

[Mathias Kunter <mathiaskunter@gmail.com>]

Dear members of the gdb mailing list,

I'm working on a patch for Eclipse which adds full charset support to 
the CDT debugger. We're setting gdb's host-charset to UTF-8 to achieve 
this. There already had been discussion about this back in 2010 here on 
the gdb mailing list. Tom Tromey said back then - quoted from 
http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2010-08/msg00129.html

 > It is an oddity that currently an MI consumer must check gdb's
 > host charset in order to know how to decode its output.  I would
 > recommend that the client force it to be UTF-8, but I think this
 > currently may not work with PHONY_ICONV.

So the question is, is it actually a good idea to simply always set 
gdb's host charset to UTF-8? Which hosts do use the phony iconv, and is 
it indeed a problem for them if the host charset is UTF-8?

Note that we're only talking about gdb 7.0 or later. We don't plan to 
support this feature for gdb < 7.0 within CDT.

Thanks for any hints!
Mathias


PS: Just for reference: the corresponding Eclipse bug report can be 
found at https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=307311