Re: Filenames with accented characters

[Bryce McKinlay <bryce at mckinlay dot net dot nz>]

On Nov 19, 2003, at 8:09 AM, Mohan Embar wrote:

> Secondly, the issue of internationalization within libgcj is just part 
> of
> the entire solution. Currently, since mingw32-gcj is compiled without 
> national
> language support, my compile chokes even when I have accented
> characters in the source. Danny Smith philosophized over the inclusion
> of libiconv in mingw32-gcc, but as far as I know, we haven't gotten
> to the root of this problem yet:

Presumably, this is only a problem for GCJ running natively on Windows? 
In any case its not really related to the issue below.

> Thirdly, there is the issue of Win9X support. Since:
>
> - not supporting Win9X would make our solution more elegant,
> - I feel we should support Win9X anyway so as not to alienate users
> - I personally don't much care for Win9X

In my experience its becoming pretty rare to see anything < Win2K "in 
the wild" these days.  So, IMO a "> Win9X" solution would be ok, 
especially if it doesn't break Win9X any more than it already is and 
doesn't preclude someone adding support later.

> a real, tested patch which I can apply with my eyes closed. And here 
> again,
> I am reluctant to promote this as the "final solution" before we can
> investigate Bryce's suggestions and do this properly.

Although ideally I'd like to see a common character-conversion 
framework across libgcj's native codebase, clearly it will be a lot of 
work to do it right - and there are other priorities. Since modern Unix 
OS's are pretty much UTF8 compliant these days, its much more important 
for Windows than any other OS - so, at least as an interim measure, I'm 
certainly not adverse to a patch that implements windows-specific 
character conversion using the OS functions.

Regards

Bryce.