Re: utf8 patch for mc, slang 2 version

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont uhulinux hu>]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 07:14:41PM +0200, Tomasz Kłoczko wrote:

> BTW: anyone is working on UFT-8 support for ncurses(w) backend ?

I don't think so, and I don't think it is worth it. Maintaining two backends
IMHO just causes headaches while it doesn't make mc better. I still can't
see why developers do not decide which one to use and drop the other one.

With Unicode support maintaining the two will be much harder since AFAIK
slang works with UTF-8 while ncurses uses UCS-4. Hence a completely
different patch would be required for the two cases.

> BTW2: few monts ago was on this list about converting in source 
> tree alle po/*.po files to UTF-8 .. still not done. Any reasons ?
> 
> It can be performed by:
> 
> [mc]$ for i in po/*.po; do msgconv -t UTF-8 $i -o $i; done

Are you sure it is safe to use the same output file? I'd rather use a tmp
file. It depends on msgconv's internal implementation, but I can easily
imagine a situation where the writing file descriptor's position exceeds the
reading position (since UTF-8 is longer than the 8-bit version) and this may
cause invalid results. Due to buffered read and write requests I guess it
needs larger files (with approx. 4096 -- 8192 accented characters) for this
bug to occur. I'm not sure, though, just reasonably paranoid :-)



-- 
Egmont