David Dawes <dawes@XFree86.Org> wrote:
> We try to take backward compatibility seriously.  That issue was
> probably my main reservation I personally had about including the
> Xutf8 interfaces.  If it is eventually decided that there is a
> better way of providing the funtionality they provide, then we'll
> need to keep them around for a while for compatibility reasons.
> My personal opinion is that it was worth doing it in this case.

Sigh.

As I repeatedly said here, the feature that Xutf8 APIs provide 
can be provided by already existing Xwc/Xmb APIs by the following 
code fragment:
	current_locale = setlocale(LC_CTYPE, NULL);
	setlocale(LC_CTYPE, NAME_OF_en_US_UTF_8_locale);
	... create Unicode FontSet here ...
	setlocale(LC_CTYPE, current_locale);
Portable programs should use this code rather than newly introduced
worthless Xutf8 APIs.
In other words, there is no need to introduce new APIs like Xutf8*,
the things should be done is (as I repeatedly said) to make usable
UTF-8 X_LOCALE for systems which don't have working UTF-8 system
locale (and perhaps, adding very few new APIs which have explict 
locale argument for multi-thread multi-locale programs).

Despite your statement, apparently the XFree86 project doesn't 
really care about compatibilty and portablitity seriously, if the 
project really take care of compatitibility, the project must
not add new APIs immediately before the release with ignoring
all objections.

I must say the XFree86 project now seems to lack technical ability 
and responsibility about internatinalization area. Probably we 
should create new Open Source X11 project for X client side.
--
soda