Filenames with accented characters

[Mohan Embar]

Hi Bryce,

>> 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.

I understand this isn't the same issue. What I meant was "If we have libiconv
around for gcj, then this might influence our course of action for libgcj."

>> 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.

An elegant WinNT-only solution would completely break Win9X unless
we brought UNICOWS into the picture, which I now agree with João
that we don't want to do.

>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.

I thought that POSIX filenames were broken too. In any case, having
a Win32-only solution would definitely lower the barrier to implementing
this.

What are your thoughts as to whether something like this is still suitable
for 3.4 or not?

-- Mohan
http://www.thisiscool.com/
http://www.animalsong.org/