Unicode (was Re: Updating ncurses in base)
J.R. Oldroyd
fbsd at opal.com
Mon Jun 26 17:08:49 UTC 2006
Is it time to consider making the utf-8 encoding the default character
encoding in FreeBSD?
Most other OSs have moved to utf-8 over the last few years. We
remain somewhat behind in this respect, which is odd, considering
the wide international participation in the FreeBSD community.
It's not much work to do this. The notes in the link I posted
and the earlier message which started this thread suggest where
work still needs to be done:
- ncurses in the base system will need updating to a
current version with wide-character support
- we may need to update the base fonts so that more
iso10646 ones have more complete character support
- some work will need to be done to fix wide-character
related bugs in a few utilities, e.g., nvi
- utf-8 will have to be made the default character
encoding in startup scripts for the various utilities
and ports that are affected
- there may be a number of files on the system which
will need iconv'ing from iso8859 to utf-8
- the FreeBSD Handbook will need updating
Such a change would be transparent for folk still using only 7-bit
text. Folk with 8-bit text stored as 8859 will have to convert all
such files to utf-8 so they'll need some sort of head's up when we
change the system default.
If there's interest, I can help coordinate a ToDo list to track
what needs to be done.
-jr
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