Re: Request for discussion - how to make MC unicode capable

[Leonard den Ottolander <leonard den ottolander nl>]

Hello Pavel,

On Sat, 2007-02-24 at 14:57 +0200, Pavel Tsekov wrote:
> I'd like to initiate a discussion on how to make MC
> unicode deal with multibyte character sets.

Just a few thoughts:

- Because multibyte is rather more memory hungry I think the user should
still have the option to toggle the use of an 8bit path either in the
interface or at compile time. This means where the UTF-8 patches replace
paths we should preferably implement two paths.
- I suppose a lot of the code of the UTF-8 patch can be reused, only we
will need to add iconv() calls in the appropriate places. libiconv is
already expected so not much trouble with the make files there. Iconv
should only be used for the multibyte path, not the 8bit path. Using the
multibyte path would still enable users to translate from one 8bit
charset to another.
- Unsupported character substitution character should be an ini option
(and define some defaults for all/many character sets). (I'm not sure
question mark is supported in all character sets.)
- Users should be able to set character set per directory (mount). Of
course there should be a system wide default taken from the environment
(but also overridable).
- Copy/move dialogs should have a toggle to iconv the file name or do a
binary name copy.
- Maybe copy/move dialogs should also have a toggle to iconv file
content, which could be quite usable for text files. A warning dialog on
every copy/move (that the user explicitly has to disable) might be a
good addition then, to help uninformed users avoiding to screw up their
data.

These are the things I can come up with so far.

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research