Subject: Re: Permit loose matching of codeset names in locales
To: SODA Noriyuki <soda@sra.co.jp>
From: Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 09/05/2004 11:46:48
On Sun, 5 Sep 2004, SODA Noriyuki wrote:

> >>>>> On Sat, 4 Sep 2004 13:39:07 +0900 (JST),
> 	Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> said:
>
> > I don't think that this is needless complexity. Keep in mind that the
> > charset name is user input; making it easier for the user to supply this
> > value to the system is a definite benefit, IMHO.
>
> Are you typing charset names regularly?
> If so, I think your environment is somewhat unusual.

Please, these are *character set encodings*, not character sets. JIS X
208 is a character set. It is represented in many encodings, such as
ISO-2022-JP, EUC-JP, Shift_JIS and UTF-8.

I'm not setting LANG, locale, etc. regularly by hand, no. I have three
main concerns:

    1. There is a standard set of encoding names that is widely used.
    Let's use that, rather than be different for no good reason.

    2. I use one set of configuration files for my accounts across
    several operating systems. The less I have to do stuff like

	case `uname` in
	    NetBSD) ...
	    Linux) ...

    the happer I am.

    3. If we can be compatable with Linux, particularly, and to a lesser
    degree with other popular OSes such as Solaris, without too much
    difficulty, we should be. That way it's easier to sell using NetBSD
    rather than Linux.

> Also, if you really want to support case insenitive things, you should
> support environment $lang, $Lang as environment variable as well
> as $LANG, for example.

I know of no other OS that supports that, so I don't see a lot of
benefit to NetBSD supporting it. "LANG" is the standard, both in theory
(POSIX) and in practice (the popular operating systems out there).

> Our codeset names aren't such "our own" things.
> Our codeset names conform existing UNIX conventions as far as
> possible, so our current names are just exactly compatible with most
> commercial UNIX variants.
>
> Changing this is rather "our own" thing, because it makes ours
> different from existing UNIX conventions.

If we're compatable with commercial Unix implementations, that's good.
This change would not make us incompatable with that.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
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