Re: Feature request: multibyte user-full-name

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <address@hidden>, AIDA Shinra <address@hidden> writes:

>> 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".

Ah, I see, but as for "directory service", we already have
ldap-coding-system (lisp/net/ldap.el).  It seems that adding
"directory-service-coding-system" is confusing.  The most
specific variable name will be
"gecos-coding-system"... not that attractive.

> 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...

Ummm.

>> 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.

I mean an unrecoverable error.  When Emacs incorrectly
decodes user-full-name, if it can be recoverable by trying
the same command again after setting a proper coding system
to some variable, it may not be that serious error.

---
Kenichi Handa
address@hidden