Re: Unicode-based FreeBSD

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 03:16:43PM +0400, Alexander Churanov wrote:
Thomas,

2008/8/23, Thomas Dickey <dickey@xxxxxxxxx>:

...but it does help if the terminal can display the result.

...before IUTF8, there was some consensus for a few years that it was
up to the application to do proper backspacing. (ncurses does this anyway,
but apparently shell interpreters such as bash need extra assistance).

In brief my idea is that system and applications use UTF-8 and syscond just
maps UTF-8 to 256 (or whatever) characters it is actually able to display.
This is very similar to current screenmaps, but new maps will just describe
what 256 characters of the whole unicode range can be actually displayed.
Or, in other words, always map from UTF-8.

There are many applications that do not yet support UTF-8.
It would be bad if applications that just output 8-bit characters "as-is"
were broken.
If an application were to output characters from (e.g.) ISO-8859-1 and
syscons were to interpret them as UTF-8 it would not be pretty.


Then, since syscons is going to be unicode-aware, it can do proper
backspacing if it is given a sequence of 4 bytes where first 3 describe a
single code point and fourth is a backslash. In my opinion, this solution
would mostly keep current applications running correctly and introduce the
ability to use UTF-8 IO.

I suspect it would actually break many current applications.



--
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
_______________________________________________
freebsd-current@xxxxxxxxxxx mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxx"