Re: LSB status of sarge?
On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 15:58, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 03:45:24PM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> >As I understood it, this was the major objection. However, I've also
> >heard that the patch works this way because of some performance
> >considerations when handling unibyte with the multibyte code.
>
> I've heard that too. Bottom line is that nobody who has to maintain the
> code in question wants to maintain two code paths with logic that should
> be identical except in character width.
Right. But would it be acceptable to just strip out the unibyte code
path and fix up other omissions found? It would seem not. That's some
of what I'm looking for.
> >It's my understanding that a proper multibyte implementation still uses
> >fixed-width characters, just wider. Specifically, most people told me
> >that it's futile to use UTF-8 Unicode internally; instead, UTF-8 input
> >should be converted to UCS-2 for internal use and then manipulated as
> >multibyte.
>
> Interesting, since UCS-2 doesn't cover the whole unicode space. I assume
> the patches are handling the necessary mapping?
It's also been my understanding that the Basic Multilingual Plane is all
the standards are currently concerned about, which makes UCS-2
acceptable. Certainly no application concerned about the overhead of
multibyte is going to want to have UCS-4 forced upon them.
> >Obviously, the question is: what to do with UTF-8 in external files?
>
> Not just files, consider command line arguments.
Well, right. I meant "external data sources".
> >It may not be "the" patch, but it is "a" patch, and the lack of any
> >other makes it "the" patch by default. Certainly the other
> >distributions have been taking that approach.
>
> It may be the patch by default, but that doesn't mean it will be
> included. Each distribution has to decide which ugly hacks it is willing
> to support. This isn't the first time that the choices have diverged.
No, but what happens when the LSB's patience wears out, especially given
that the LSB is now policy?
That's why I'm hoping to fix up the patch to make it acceptable to
everyone.
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