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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