Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:56:21 +0400 From: "Alexander Churanov" <alexanderchuranov@gmail.com> To: "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Svavar_L=FAthersson?=" <svavar@kjarrval.is> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unicode-based FreeBSD Message-ID: <3cb459ed0808251656l5716ee51y5bddf34fb8809b0c@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <48B336D8.2030300@kjarrval.is> References: <3cb459ed0808221700w335b0906g6901d8b8bec4dad9@mail.gmail.com> <200808241415.31812.mitchell@wyatt672earp.force9.co.uk> <6a7033710808241239p1cbdc7adwd4f87814b428b10b@mail.gmail.com> <3cb459ed0808241958v552eafejf7841f0f9993928e@mail.gmail.com> <48B28B8D.9030305@kjarrval.is> <3cb459ed0808250621s28a1b825u1cc16939951bb157@mail.gmail.com> <48B336D8.2030300@kjarrval.is>
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Svavar, I am trying to understand you. 2008/8/26 Svavar L=FAthersson <svavar@kjarrval.is> > The Icelandic alphabet works in editors like pico but I have not found > another editor where it actually displays the characters correctly. I > checked edit, vi and vipw to be sure. It might be a configuration problem= or > a lack of it but it's better for the user experience if it works > out-of-the-box. It should be enough to configure it in one place and it > should work "everywhere". > Hmm. A minute ago I've pressed Ctrl-Alt-F3, switched to syscons console, started "emacs /tmp/test", where "test" was written in russian, typed some russian text into, closed the editor and then started "cat /tmp/test". No problems. I still can not understand what's the difference between ISO-8859-1 and KOI8-R from the implementation point of view. It seems that = I need to try to configure a system for Icelandic. I'll do that tomorrow on a dedicated box. I promise to help you with configuration in case It's at all possible. > The primary problem of the character support in syscons is displaying > specialised characters on the screen/tty. When I use the special Icelandi= c > characters in UTF-8, each character is displayed as "??" which is very > confusing to see if there are 2 or more in a row... This is exactly what I am trying to solve, examining opinions on this list at the same time. > Of course there are certain problems with changing the filenames between > languages like Russian and Icelandic since the normal keyboard only has > about 100 keys and cannot possible contain all the characters in the Unic= ode > specification. There are special Input Methods for the rest of Unicode (more than 200K cod= e points currently assigned). > It however should not stop me from reading the filenames in the language > they were written. As for writing characters in other languages, the > "Windows approach" steps in the right direction by enabling me to change = the > input language and therefore type in characters I would not otherwise be > able to with the Icelandic keyboard. If the characters are translated to > Unicode, it should not matter what keyboard layout is used. As for how it > would be carried out in FreeBSD, I will leave it up to the developers. For switching I use CapsLock when in plain syscons console and Alt+Shift when in X. By the way, how Windows displays non-ASCII characters in plain text console? I'll wonder if better than suggested by me. > The aforementioned is why I am suggesting that the system should be moved > directly to UTF-32. If it is moved to UTF-8 and there is a need in the > future for UTF-16 or -32, the conversion process has to start again. I'm sure that it is not necessary. Again, all UTFs encode THE SAME SET. But UTF-32 is better for single characters. And UTF-8 is better for UNIX-like systems. > Like I mentioned in my former answer, the program writers do not write > Unicode compatible programs because there is almost no Unicode support an= d > the FreeBSD developers see little reason to speed up Unicode implementati= on > because there are so few programs Unicode compatible. Therefore I think t= hat > FreeBSD should implement a Unicode support policy and move straight to > UTF-32 and make it the FreeBSD default. I am not pretending that this > project will be easy, painless and quick but it is better done sooner tha= n > later. Said policy could begin by announcing an active plan for Unicode > support and suggest that every new FreeBSD project should support Unicode= . > At the same time it should suggest the same to other developers which wri= te > software for FreeBSD. When the time is right or after further steps, the > FreeBSD Foundation should announce that after version X, Unicode will be > default charset. At that time, the software which has Unicode support wil= l > (I hope) work flawlessly with Unicode characters. When UTF-32 would be fu= lly > supported in FreeBSD, the developers could wait for the end of the suppor= t > cycle for the first version with full UTF-32 support and then make it the > default in the versions to come. That way the backward compatibility woul= d > be great and for all supported versions of FreeBSD. Probably, this is useful, but I'm sure that this is out of scope of my little project. I do not have enough power to enforce such a policy. > Me=F0 kve=F0ju / With regards, > Svavar Kjarrval (svavar@kjarrval.is) > s. 863-9900 > Alexander Churanov
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