SoC 2009: BSD-licensed libiconv in base system

[Prashant Vaibhav]

>
> My ex-girlfriend is working in Nepal [...] Even this country's encoding is
> supported.


Probably because Nepali language doesn't have a separate script, they use
Devanagari!  :-)




On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Gabor Kovesdan <gabor at freebsd.org> wrote:

> David Schultz escribió:
>
>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 11:49:41AM -0700, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> David Schultz wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> ... whether it would make more sense to standardize on something like
>>>>> UCS-4 for the internal representation.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> YES.  Without this, wchar_t is useless.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I strongly disagree. Everything can be represented as UCS-4 is a bad
>>> assumption, but something Americans and Europeans naturally don't have
>>> to care about.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> ...but isn't this moot at present because there are no
>> widely-accepted encodings that include characters that
>> aren't supported by UCS-4? Citrus doesn't seem to support
>> any such encodings in any case.
>>
>>
> 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.
>
>> If this ever really becomes an issue, we could always stuff
>> locale-dependent encodings into unused UCS-4 code pages.
>> However, it doesn't seem worthwhile to deliberately burden
>> programmers over concerns that are presently, and for the
>> foreseeable future, hypothetical.
>>
>>
> I'm not a Unicode expert, but isn't the reason of periodical standard
> reviews and changes to cover more and more human languages? We could just
> support the latest Unicode standard and let the Unicode workgroups map those
> new characters into unused code points. The Latin-based, Cyrillic,
> Devanagari and CJK encodings are well-supported, I think. I don't know too
> much about CJK encondings, though, if the thousands of ideographs are all
> supported or not. But I'd say the most significant languages that are used
> on the Internet are supported, the rest might have another problems...
>
> [OFF]
> 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. My ex-girlfriend is working in Nepal in a cooperation
> program (it's kinda scholarship) and she told me that they only have
> electricity in 8 hours a day, 4 during the night and 4 during the day. There
> are no sidewalks for pedestrians, they go along with the cars on the street
> and the pollution is extremely high. Even this country's encoding is
> supported. What I am trying to say is that countries with unsupported
> languages probably won't really care about character encodings if they
> rarely have computers... I can just hope that their living conditions will
> get better and their language will be supported. I can also hope that the
> Unicode people will focus more on these countries instead of fucking up the
> time with fictionary languages from fairy tales... [1]
> Probably I'll go to visit her in Nepal in January, it will be an
> interesting experience. I'll check if I can help the IT world there with
> anything.
> [ON]
>
> Another idea to consider. Are all of our utilities wchar-clean? What about
> library functions? (regex is surely not) Do we lack any important utility or
> library? (we still do lack iconv and gettext and what else...?) What about
> standards, like C99 wchar functions? Is there something missing? What about
> POSIX if it has something related? Personally, I think that these are more
> important questions than support of some extremely rare languages. It's
> worth to consider how to deal with them later but the basic problems need a
> higher priority.
>
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengwar#Unicode
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Gabor Kovesdan
> FreeBSD Volunteer
>
> EMAIL: gabor at FreeBSD.org .:|:. gabor at kovesdan.org
> WEB:   http://people.FreeBSD.org/~gabor .:|:. http://kovesdan.org
>
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