Re: "Display bits"

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont uhulinux hu>]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 11:52:56PM +0200, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

> Any objection against me changing the string "Display bits" in the
> options menu to "Character coding"?

What's the real purpose of that option at all? 

If we're talking about which characters the terminal is able to display then
this should be taken from the locale environment variables and should
_not_ be configurable inside mc. This is not a user issue, this is a
distribution or sysadmin issue. It's the distribution
creators' or the sysadmin's job to set up the environment variables in a way
that is consistent with the actual behavior of the terminal and that things
_just work_ and the user needs no knowledge about the terminal charset and
the way to alter it. Then it makes absolutely no sense the alter an
application's behavior without altering the terminal's behavior, these two
have to be done consistently. So if someone needs a different setting than
the system wide then sure he'll need it for all his applications so he will
need to 1) alter the terminal emulator's behavior, 2) alter all the
applications by properly setting LC_stuff. Hence IMHO it makes absolutely no
sense for any application to be able to override the assumption of the
terminal's character set. It is given by nl_langinfo(CODESET), if it doesn't
then the system is hopelessly misconfigured and should be fixed outside mc.

On the other hand, it would be a nice feature to be able to set the assumed
character set for filenames and file contents in mc. This way it would be
able to, let's say, properly display some Latin-2 encoded files over an
UTF-8 terminal (some time in the future when it has Unicode support). Of
course this needs a lot of internal iconv'ing. The assumed character set of
user data (which is independent from the terminal character set) should be
configurable from the menu and should have the name "Character encoding" or
similar.



-- 
Egmont