Re: Feature request: multibyte user-full-name

[AIDA Shinra]

> > Hello,
> > user-full-name might contain non-ASCII characters. For example,
> > pw_gecos is encoded in UTF-8 on Darwin.
> 
> > No technical problems exist except in which coding system should Emacs
> > decode the username. We have three options:
> 
> > 1. Introduce something like directory-system-coding-system and guess
> > it in set-locale-environment.
> 
> > 2. Apply file-name-coding-system and pray that it works.
> 
> > 3. Hardcode for each platform.
> 
> Why do you think that pw_gecos is related to something like
> directory or file name?

About 1: "directory system" is my miswording. I meant "directory
service".

About 2: *Pray* that an operating system and/or administrator adopt
the same encoding.

> Anyway, as far as a system allows users to switch locale, I
> think, pw_gecos must adopt locale-independent encoding, thus
> the possible encoding is one of UTF-*.  And, considering
> backward compatibility, it should be UTF-8.  Then, how about
> we always decode it by utf-8 (only if it contains a byte
> with MSB set) while falling back to locale-coding-system
> (invalid utf-8 sequence is found), and see if that works on
> any systems?   How does GNU/Linux encode it?

A site administrator might choose an encoding other than UTF-8 even if
it is locale-dependent...

> By the way, does the mis-decoding of user-full-name lead to
> any serious error?

I can't determine your "serious" means but user-full-name is widely
used anyway.