SoC 2009: BSD-licensed libiconv in base system

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 11:08:49AM +0200, Gabor Kovesdan wrote:
> Citrus is based on UCS-4 as an internal encoding, just like the another  
> BSD-licensed iconv library. This is a barrier to support encodings that  
> aren't supported by UCS-4.

More precisely is that Citrus can and will use UCS-4 as appropiate.
It does not enforce it. Which is an important difference. One reason
that it is often used is that it helps to avoid exponential growth of
the translation tables. It just isn't worth the time to write ISO-8859-1
to ISO-8859-15 (trivial), if the translation to and from UCS4 gives the
same result with marginally more work.

> It's possible that there are little poor countries with an own writing  
> system but probably their writing system is unsupported because the  
> starvation, poorness and lack of water and electricity are more serious  
> problems there.

I wouldn't call all both parts of Korea little poor countries and it is
a wonderful example for why UCS 4 Level 1 can be problematic.

Joerg