Subject: Re: UTF-8 Cygwin
From: Paulo Castro <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:40:59 -0300 (ART)

Hello.

I would like to ask that the decision to reject Mr Suzuki
Hisao's patch to include UTF-8 file name support in Cygwin was
reconsidered. I've read the discussion between Mr Suzuki Hisao
and Mr Christopher Faylor (cygwin-patches mail list, thread
"UTF-8 Cygwin", 26 Jun - 06 Jul 2006), and Christopher's
arguments didn't convince me: as it appears, it was mostly an
issue with function wrappers not being a solution as clean and
elegant as the ideal. The alternative would be a major redesign
in Cygwin that would require considerable additional efforts
which no one seems to be willing to undertake at this time.

I am not a Cygwin developer and therefore I'm not the most
qualified person to tell whether the decision to reject the
patch was appropriate. However, as an European user of Cygwin,
I'd like to stress that UTF-8 file name support is a major issue
that deserves attention. I believe that there is a very large
community of non English-speaking users that could benefit from
that patch right now. Users who, like me, have to be constantly
renaming files to use the English alphabet in order for their
bash scripts to work. Here's how my "ls -l" results show up:

ls: ?????? - ????????.txt: No such file or directory
ls: ?????? - ????????.txt: No such file or directory
ls: ?????? - ????????.txt: No such file or directory
ls: ??????04.doc: No such file or directory

The question marks appear in place of Cyrillic characters
(Russian) and sometimes in place of some letters with
diacritics. With the UTF-8 patch and using the proper xterm
flags and fonts, it works fine.

So unless there are really major flaws with the patch
implementation, it would be a great contribution to the offical
Cygwin. In the future, the function wrappers could be cleaned
up, perhaps as part of a major Cygwin redesign.

Cheers,
Paulo

		
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