Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 20:06:30 EST From: "Kaleb S. KEITHLEY" <kaleb@x.org> To: hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org Cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) Subject: Re: A couple problems in FreeBSD 2.1.0-950922-SNAP Message-ID: <199510160006.UAA06783@exalt.x.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 16 Oct 1995 00:03:59 EST. <199510152303.AAA22305@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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> As Kaleb S. KEITHLEY wrote: > > > > As near as I can tell the SVR4 ls doesn't change its locale, yet still > > manages to do the right thing, probably because for most SVR4-en the C > > locale is full ISO8859-1. This leads me to believe that FreeBSD's ls > > probably doesn't need to change its locale either if the default chartype > > table is fully populated. > > So SVR4 would still break on koi8-r, for example. No it wouldn't because SVR4 doesn't have a koi8-r locale. If it has anything it probably is based on ISO8859-5, which, if I'm not mistaken, uses ASCII on the left side and Cyrillic on the right side; thus a multi- byte string like a file name might look different in one locale than in another. I have a perhaps naive presumption that if I created a multi-byte string in a particular locale that I would always try to look at it in the same locale. The only way to *really* solve this is to do something like use widechar strings in the file system and declare that all filenames are encoded in something like Unicode. Unless I misunderstood him, this is what Terry Lambert was lobbying for a couple of weeks ago, when he was asking for 16-bit wchar_t. This has all kinds of implications, but let's not go down that rathole right now. :-) > Either make it right, or let it be. Define right! I don't see it as wrong to populate the right half of the default chartype table with values that are useful in some particular locale -- in this case "C". No more wrong than leaving them blank. It is merely a convenience simple programs be able to do something useful for the majority of the users. Is the customer always right? If a particular tool isn't very useful in the general case, a customer might choose another another tool that is, in the general case, more useful. > > isctype() is not necessarily related to message catalogs. ??? I didn't say it was. I said that changing programs to set the locale was not very interesting (or necessary) unless you were going to make them use message catalogs for their output. >The > extensive (i.e. blatant) use of message catalogs (AIX, IRIX) leads to > very undesirable results, e.g. SMTP daemons throwing their error > messages in German. :-( It's hard for me to know how something like smtpd would get its locale set to de_DE in order to do that, but I wonder if that wouldn't be what I'd want if I were in Germany.
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