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Re: UTF-8

From: Greg Hudson <ghudson_at_MIT.EDU>
Date: 2002-05-23 15:39:17 CEST

(Major irritation: I can't get at Marcus's patch via the list archives
to review it again. When I click on the attachment, I get a server
error. This is in addition to having to frob the URL to get to the
messages at the end of a month to find it in the first place.)

On Thu, 2002-05-23 at 08:26, Marcus Comstedt wrote:
> They are necessary because Subversion is not a closed world. It needs
> to communicate with the operating system and the user. If they do not
> use UTF-8, and Subversion does internally, conversions need to be
> made.

Or they have more incentive to want tools which use UTF-8. We lose most
of the advantage of Unicode if we have to put in the conversion hooks
everywhere anyway to support legacy character sets.

Also, even if we don't do conversion, I don't think we really hurt sites
which want to use some alternate character set. We can version
arbitrary binary data, not just UTF-8 data. We don't enforce UTF-8
validity of strings anywhere in the code. So as long as everyone is
using the same character set, they'll be okay even if it isn't UTF-8.

Your stated design was:
> · Therefore, all system calls (direct, via APR, or via libc)
> involving strings have to use converted versions of the strings.

"All system calls" is kind of vague, but the implication is that the
Subversion libraries will write out and read in all data in the native
character set--to files, and over the wire on the network. That doesn't
seem right at all; it would mean that a client and server couldn't talk
to each other if they didn't use the same character set, and that a
working directory couldn't be moved between machines which used
different character sets.

If you're taking a less expansive approach than that, please describe
what the libraries do which needs to do character set conversion, and
what doesn't.

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Received on Thu May 23 15:40:36 2002

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