[Vm-dev] Re: Unix VM path encodings

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

> Hm ... lemme try this ... ah, interesting. It appears 
> that I can make the Umlauts work on Unix correctly if and only if:
> * I fix the above method to return UTF8TextConverter in every case [*1]
> * I use -pathenc MacRoman -textenc MacRoman
> Which makes no sense to me since neither the path nor the text encoding 
> is MacRoman but it appears to work. Huh?

  Yes, on Unix VM, another historical mishappen caused it; "MacRoman"
still means "no conversion" so that if the image passes UTF-8 string,
the UTF-8 string is passed to system calls.

> [*1] And that of course reminds me that nobody has really made any 
> comment on why the hell we still deal with all of these nonsensical 
> legacy encodings and don't just go straight to UTF-8 in the VM interface 
> which would simplify *lots* of cruft in the code.

  Well, nobody tried to change stuff on the all platforms at once.
Windows is doing ok with 3.10 VM and OLPC Etoys image (there is still
code that deals with older VM... typical installation for people is to
install stuff from squeakland.org and then use Etoys image).

-- Yoshiki