Re: httpd and locales

* Nicolás Lichtmaier wrote:

> > To take a step back, it might not be unreasonable to have the hook
> > scripts communicate through UTF8 and document it. The hook scripts
> > would have to be careful to make things it invokes to consume/produce
> > UTF8. I'm not sure if can just change this for compatibility reasons,
> > though.
>
> The users complainig are a minority.

Aha. How do you know that? I think, one can get the impression, because most
people just use US-ASCII for their filenames and have never a chance to
find out that something doesn't work. But I don't think, it's true; see
below.

> The majority out there would be
> very surprised and it would curse the developers when they can no longer
> call svnlook without complex (for them) charset conversions.

I think, it's *easy* to add a command line switch to svnlook and all the
other programs, which tells them, that all input is UTF-8.

In contrast it's kinda silly, that every program out there that happens to
use the bindings or the libraries directly first converts all stuff from
locale to utf-8 and (as happening with the path to the repository itself)
let the library convert it back. That's just not logical.

By the way - are the paths passed via STDIN (locking hooks) also translated
to the locale? A quick check shows: No, they're not. But I may be wrong
here.

> If someone
> has an UTF-8 system he should set the locale.

Subversion claims to be an UTF-8 system by itself. It _does not need_ the
locale as long as it moves data inside the system. There is still the
problem, that hooks even don't know the locale so far (as with svn 1.3!)
anyway. So sort of a majority of the users actually have the C locale
inside their hook scripts (and because they're using ascii filenames, they
don't get any problem, as said above).

> If other components
> (Apache) cause undesirable effects then those components are the ones in
> need for a fix, not subversion.

I think, this thought is too easy. Subversion is typically just one
component of a bigger system. It's not in the position to dictate the
environment (which isn't even handled consistently by itself).

Please get me right, IMHO on of the great things about svn *is* the unicode
ability, and it would be sad if it got kinda lost, or, let's say
restricted, because of a another feature (namely hooks).

just my EUR .02
nd

-- 
"Das Verhalten von Gates hatte mir bewiesen, dass ich auf ihn und seine
beiden Gefährten nicht zu zählen brauchte" -- Karl May, "Winnetou III"
Im Westen was neues: <http://pub.perlig.de/books.html#apache2>
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