[Vm-dev] accents in unix using non-english languages

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Fri Sep 28 21:07:28 UTC 2007


On Sep 28, 2007, at 20:25 , Andreas Raab wrote:

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> I believe the VM side should actually be fine - what is lacking is  
>> a way to ensure that VM and image agree on a common encoding.  
>> There were some proposals in the last couple of years but none got  
>> adopted. So it's the user who must ensure it works, and this  
>> indeed is undocumented.
>
> What's wrong with universally adopting UTF-8? The Windows VM does  
> that now and it seems far superior to having to deal with tons of  
> different encodings.
>
>> Perhaps a simple step to clean up the mess is adding three new  
>> system attributes to allow the image to know the current VM  
>> encoding for keyboard, clipboard, and file names. Then fix the  
>> image to set converters using these attributes, instead of second- 
>> guessing from the platform string as it is done now.
>
> Perhaps a simpler step is to assume everything is UTF-8 and give  
> people a little CS which turns all these converters under all  
> circumstances to UTF-8?

This would break compatibility with older images - until new we tried  
to preserve backwards-compatibility.

For my specific purposes, switching to UTF-8 in general would be fine  
- what about others?

- Bert -




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