Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Why is utf8 type _NOVERIFY, and other vocab stuff.

[Zack Weinberg]

On 2/15/07, Lapo Luchini <address@hidden> wrote:
> Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> > (Also,
> > there were reports that the _best_effort code didn't actually work
> > with lots of broken iconv's found in the wild...)
>
> On Derek's super-laptop "UTF8 to ASCII//IGNORE//TRANSLIT" actually
> failed just like it was plain "UTF8 to ASCII". AFAIR it was a Gentoo.

The //IGNORE and //TRANSLIT features are glibc / GNU libiconv
specific, but I would have thought that they were available in recent
Gentoo (they've been around since 2001 give or take).

The real problem, though, is that an awful lot of non-GNUish systems
have iconv implementations that are useless.  I mean _useless_.  They
implement hardly any conversions at all.  We have to have the "(list
of names for ASCII) <-> UTF8" shortcut for _correctness_, not just for
speed; real live systems don't support conversion between their own
locale's name for ASCII and UTF-8.   *headdesk*

It might be possible to bundle GNU libiconv, but I hesitate to
recommend that because I recall its being another Haible/Drepper build
system monstrosity like intl.

> I'm willing to debug it further, if someone gives me access to a system
> in which I can verify the failure... or, even easier, I could create a
> smallish program that only has a fixes UTF8 string inside itself and ask
> on the command line for a charset and simply call the iconv function
> with those 2 parameters...

Many systems have an iconv(1) command line utility that may be helpful here.

zw