SoC 2009: BSD-licensed libiconv in base system

[Erik Trulsson]

On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 02:28:51PM +0400, Alexander Churanov wrote:
> Gabor, Joerg,
> 
> I am currently working on UTF-8 support in syscons and highly
> interested in making FreeBSD using UTF-8 out of box.
> 
> There is my $0.02:
> 
> 1) Why discuss UCS-4 at all? UTF-32 is alreay in place. SImple,
> standardized, fixed-width and stateless.

UCS-4 and UTF-32 are, for most purposes, just two different names
for the same encoding.


> 2) I'm against using wchar_t internally, because C language standard
> does not require that a wchar_t variable can hold an UTF-32 code
> point.

The C standard has very few requirements on wchar_t.  It is up to each
implementation to decide how wchar_t is defined.
There is nothing which prevents the FreeBSD project from deciding
that on FreeBSD wchar_t is always 32 bits wide, which can then be relied
upon in FreeBSD-specific code.  It is not like somebody else will change
the relevant include files without warning.


> 3) Please, give an example of character that does not fit into UCS-4.
> I'll check whether it fits into UTF-32. I expect that any character
> fits into a single UTF-32 code point.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Alexander Churanov
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-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se