Re: Unicode versioning in glib

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Simon Josefsson <jas extundo com> writes:

> I'm looking for a library that supports unicode normalization
> (decomposition) and I discovered that glib supports this (are there
> other LGPL or GPL libraries for this?) which is good.  The problem is
> that I'm implementing some protocols which requires that the unicode
> version (and in particular decomposition tables) must be of a certain
> unicode version (3.2).
> 
> Is there any interest in supporting multiple unicode versions (for
> decomposition or in general) in GLIB?  I assume that Gnome in general
> would want to use the latest available unicode version, but this won't
> work for me.
> 
> I haven't tested, but it seems I could simply borrow
> gen-unicode-tables.pl and generate the tables which I need in my
> project, which is probably what I will start with.  But if there is
> interest in supporting this in GLIB, it is probably better.

We aren't going to support multiple versions of Unicode in GLib,
no. The amount of memory/disk space spent on the Unicode tables
is already quite significant without having to deal with multiple
copies.

(Not to mention that it would significantly complicate the API 
to have variants of functions taking Unicode version numbers.)

I believe that the Unicode consortium has sufficient attention to
backwards compatiblity to make versioned Unicode support not
needed in typical usages.

Regards,
                                        Owen