Re: Trying to fix slang

[Glenn Maynard <g_deb@zewt.org>]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 03:34:06AM +0100, Jim Mintha wrote:
> A bit of history from my point of view (the maintainer)
> 
> - Patches were submitted and added to add UTF8 support to slang
> - Unfortunately this broke quite a few programs
> - The boot-floppy people really wanted a UTF8 version so I seperated
>   the UTF8 stuff a made a seperate package so they could use that. 
>   (it was supposed to be close to release time so a temporary solution
>    was needed)
> 
> There are many bugs against the utf8 package but I expected that and
> didn't have a good answer.

Supposedly, it's still supposed to be close to release (or freeze,
anyway) time, so a temporary solution is still needed.  :)
 
> libslang.so.1-UTF8 is a terrible soname.  Why not just have
> libslang-utf8.so.1?
> 
> This way packages that can handle utf8 properly can use this library,
> and when the regular slang can be fixed properly then can just return
> to using that library.  

I think the idea was that apps would build against whatever -dev package
was installed; this is incomplete without handling #define UTF8
automatically.  It's not going to be reasonably transparent without more
work, so for the time being I'd agree--make it a completely different
library.

I just spent some time bashing on it, trying to fix line drawing characters,
and I'm bleeding out the ears--slang is not an easy library to edit.
(Perhaps the person who wrote this patch originally could step forward
and try to finish it.)

(Basically, it seems that slang uses the high bit of the color to mark
characters as ACS; but the color is 0xFF000000 in the UTF8 version, not
0xFF00, and changing this means changing a bunch of shifts in odd
places.  Maybe it's easier than it seems; I don't know enough about this
codebase to fix it in a reasonable amount of time.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard