Re: report on [bad] status of i18n of gnome apps - somebody should explicitly care about it

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 12:07:46AM +0200, Lauris Kaplinski wrote:

> a) I ported evo internals to utf-8. As a result it folders are crap in filemanagers
> (folders are ordinary directories) for most locales. What to do - no easy solution
> available.

IMHO there is no solution to that problem (on Unix) and the reason is simply
the file systems used don't have any info on charset used.
On Windows on the other side unicode is used for filenames, always, so if
a different encoding is used by programs then the standard libraries would
transparently reencode the names.

On a Linux system the equivalent would be to always use utf-8 to store
physycally on the ext2 partitions, and have the GNU libc modified so
that functions dealing with file names transpartently call iconv() to
convert to/from the user encoding (if the user is not in utf-8).

That way utf-8 enabled programs could use utf-8 names for files; and
non utf-8 aware programs will simply have the libc convert the names for them.

Handling that at the filesystem+libc level is imho the only way to do it
properly, and keep old programs working.
Implementing that at any other level will make all programs not using the
specific lib implementing it to display wrong file names (and conversly,
programs using that lib will wrongly display file names created by 
programs not using the lib).
Implementing it at the libc level has the advantages that all programs use
the libc (and statically linked ones are not aimed at i18n usage).

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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