Re: Outputting .sav files

[John Darrington]

It would give us (more) assurance that any arbitrary .sav file could
be properly decoded by pspp.

Currently we have two problems: 

1. If the "codepage" field of the file species (say) 567, we don't
know to what encoding it refers.

2. Even if we find out somehow that codepage 567 means (say) "KOI8-U",
that doesn't help unless a locale with that encoding happends to be
installed  on the system.

The ICU library will fix  both these problems (at least I think it
will, I haven't looked at it in detail yet).

In general, iconv, gettext et al have been designed to do i18n
properly from the ground up, whereas  ICU appears to be intended to
assist compatibility with legacy data which is the situation we have
with sys files.

J'


On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 08:44:38PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     
     I'm nervous about the added dependency.
     
     iconv, gettext, and gnulib, taken together, have quite a few
     tools for working with encodings and character sets.  If we add
     glib, there are a few more.  If we added (or substituted) ICU,
     what could we do better, or with much greater convenience, than
     without it?
     
     (This is a serious question.  I'm not trying to argue against
     ICU, at least not yet; I don't think I understand yet what using
     it would buy us.)

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