Re: GTetrinet proper UTF-8 support patch



El mar, 22-03-2005 a las 23:33 +0100, Emmanuel Bourg escribió:
> The issue is not really to port the server to UTF-8, for Jetrix it's 
> just a matter of changing a constant and recompiling the server. The 
> issue is to support several clients simultaneously with different 
> encodings. At some point the client has to tell the server the encoding 
> used to let the server translate the message properly for the other 
> clients, otherwise the other clients will see garbage when a gtetrinet 
> user sends non ASCII characters.

Ok, so we agree that the rest of the clients have to be fixed (I'm
assuming that we also agree that using ISO-8859-1 or ASCII as encoding
is really really awful for international gameplay). We can fix them in
two ways:

1) Extend the Tetrinet protocol to let the server know which encoding is
using each particular client.

2) Port the clients to UTF-8 (which shouldn't be hard) and just use
UTF-8 everywhere.

I think 1) is harder to implement, and it can (potentially) break
compatibility between old and new software. Also, it doesn't fix the
main issue, which is having a lot of encodings flying around the
clients, and having to support all of them in each client.

On the other hand, 2) really fixes the main issue (we'll finally be able
to forget about encodings) and I don't think it will be harder to
implement than 1). Also, it almost doesn't require to touch code in the
server side.

We also have to keep in mind what happens to those clients/servers that
aren't aware of this issue. They HAVE to be able to play with/against
UTF-8 enabled clients/servers. Messing with the protocol may render some
clients/servers incompatible, porting clients to UTF-8 can just render
some characters unreadable, which isn't a big issue compared to the
other one.

The worst side of all is that we don't have any kind of "Tetrinet High
Council" or something like that were all the Tetrinet related software
users and developers can join and discuss these and other matters which
affect to the free Tetrinet community (tell me if I'm wrong!).

It feels like I'm pushing the rest of the Tetrinet clients developers to
port their software to UTF-8. Please, do not think so, I just think that
this is better for everyone, but if the consensus is to leave things as
they are, I'll do it.

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