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Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 21:08:25 +0100
Message-ID: <416096c60909071308qc5ff057sbe9cb1dbc270554f@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: The C locale
From: Andy Koppe <andy DOT koppe AT gmail DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
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2009/9/2 IWAMURO Motonori:
> I want to use UTF-8 throughout.
> Because:
> - a lot of UNIX tools using network (e.g. rsync, scp, ...) treat the
> file name as 8bit byte array.
> - default locale of modern UNIX based OS is *.UTF-8.
> - The file with the filename including the character outside the
> codepage (e.g. files in iTunes folder) can be handled.

I'm minded to agree, but actually there's a big stumbling block here:
many interactive programs in Cygwin do not (yet) support UTF-8, e.g.
nano, mutt, and mc. If you try, you get all sorts of funny effects
with invalid characters and mispositioned cursors. That's not
acceptable as default.

Which leaves one apparently good solution for the "C" locale:
>> - Use the default Windows codepage for filenames, console, and
>> multibyte functions. This is what happens already if you specifiy a
>> locale with a language but no charset, e.g. "en". Maximum 1.5
>> compatibility.

On a closely related note, Debian are introducing a "C.UTF-8" locale
as a language-neutral locale with a UTF-8 character set. This is
useful for choosing UTF-8 without picking up language-specific stuff
like sorting rules. See here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522776. It's a rather
lengthy thread, but in the end they did decide to go for it.

Cygwin 1.7, through newlib, already has "C-UTF-8", as well as the
likes of "C-ISO-8859-1" or "C-SJIS". So how about replacing the "C-"
with "C." in those, considering that Cygwin has no backward
compatibility requirement regarding those?

Andy

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