SoC 2009: BSD-licensed libiconv in base system

[David Schultz]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009, Gábor Kövesdán wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> my name is Gábor Kövesdán. I'm a Hungarian student and I'll be working on
> a BSD-licensed libiconv implementation for FreeBSD during this year's
> Summer of Code program. It'll be based on NetBSD's Citrus iconv but there
> is a lot to do besides porting. My mentor is Xin Li.

Nice. I'm sure many people will thank you for this.

One complaint I've heard about both our wide character
implementation and Citrus iconv is that the internal (wchar_t)
encoding depends on the current locale. (Basically it uses a
packed binary version of whatever the external representation is.)
The relevant standards allow this, but it can be a pain for
application and library writers. One thing to think about is
whether it would make more sense to standardize on something like
UCS-4 for the internal representation.