Re: Getting ready for a release

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont uhulinux hu>]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 03:20:10PM +0200, Pavel Tsekov wrote:

> Lack of UTF-8 support is a big minus on the part of MC, but I think that
> your statement is a bit overestimated. It's more like MC is not following the latest trend, IMO.

I wouldn't call it 'trend'. Having splash screens, animated widgets,
translucent windows, using ajax on the web, blogging etc etc etc. are
trends. UTF-8 is the one and only known and sane way of handling all the
non-english scripts, hence it's a technical decision. Moreover, mc not
supporting UTF-8 doesn't just mean "it doesn't follow trends", it means it's
not _working_ correctly in most Linux systems - and that's more serious.

As said, modern distros use UTF-8. If you switch back to an 8-bit locale
just for mc, you'll have troubles with your text files' content, with
filenames etc. - mc will not be compatible with all the other apps. If you
switch back globally for your system, you'll only be able to use a very
small subset of non-English letters, and you'll still have problems (e.g.
when editing .desktop files, using Gtk2 file browser windows etc).

If you think of it from a user's point of view, this whole story is simply
about "just works" vs. anything else. Obviously vast majority of the users
want applications and accented/CJK/etc letters to "just work".


> I haven't looked at the UTF-8 patch recently (but I will) so I cannot
> comment it. Do you think that UTF-8 patch 'as is' is the right way to
> implement UTF-8 for MC ?

Not the right way in the long term. But maybe it's better in short term than
nothing at all - I don't know.

> And what about ncurses - it is my opinion 
> that it must not be dropped in favor of S-Lang...

I agree, and I know it still needs some work...

The whole UTF-8 story has been discussed here many times... at this moment
my goal is not to implement it or to ask you to merge the patches upstream,
I only wanted to bring your attention to this problem and hence ask you to
stick to 4.6.x version numbers. But it's just an opinion, the choice is
yours.



-- 
Egmont