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From: Eric Blake <ebb9 AT byu DOT net>
Subject:  Re: Cygwin and locale
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 19:03:34 +0000 (UTC)
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Ulrich Herrmann <uherr <at> gmx.de> writes:

> I recently switched to my favourite shell the tcsh. I encountered the  
> problem that it didn't display non ascii characters correctly. 

There are more aspects to displaying non-ascii characters than the
(lack of) locale support.  For example, bash is able to display
non-ascii characters, via the directions in
http://cygwin.com/faq/faq-nochunks.html#faq.using.unicode, without
true locale support.

> After  
> diving a little bit deeper into it I figured that Cygwin supports only the  
> minimal "C" locale and not any other locales like for the german language.

Correct - no one has ever contributed locale code to newlib, which is
the C library underlying cygwin.  About the only locale support you
get is through gettext, which only translates messages and does nothing
in the way of currency, time, collation order, or other locale aspects.

> 
> Why is the locale support not in Cygwin? Are there big obstacles to  
> porting it to cygwin?

Lack of volunteer time.  Perhaps you want to take a stab at it?  You
would be very appreciated on this list!  But it really is a HUGE
undertaking, as there are lots of details to get right (and for
newlib to accept your patches, it would have to be an optional
addon that can be compiled out for embedded systems that use
newlib for its lightweight capabilities).

-- 
Eric Blake



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