Message-Id: <200409201938.i8KJcqmx028520@delorie.com>
From: "Juan Manuel Guerrero" <st001906 AT hrz1 DOT hrz DOT tu-darmstadt DOT de>
Organization: Darmstadt University of Technology
To: djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 20:53:42 +0200
Subject: ANNOUNCE: DJGPP port of GNU libiconv-1.9.2
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This is a port of GNU Libiconv 1.9.2 to MSDOS/DJGPP.


  LIBICONV is a character set conversion library and provides
  an iconv() implementation, for use on systems which don't
  have one, or whose implementation cannot convert from/to Unicode.
  This library provides the requiered functionality to recode on-the-fly
  from UNIX charsets to MSDOS codepages. The mapping from language codes
  to DOS codepages is contained in the charset.alias file located in the
  /dev/env/DJDIR/lib subdir. Please inspect this file carefully and tell
  me if the selected DOS codepage is correct for your language.


  DJGPP specific changes.
  =======================

  -  People that port GNU distributions that use GNU gettext and libiconv,
     this means the distribution uses and provides its own charset.alias,
     to MSDOS/DJGPP should notice that the DJGPP port of libiconv does **NOT**
     provide nor will ever provide any code to deal with short file names. This
     implies that file name aliases like charset~1.ali or charset.al will not
     work at all.On WIN95/98 systems, the user **MUST** always turn off the
     generation of numeric tails for 8.3 aliases Windows creats for long file
     names **BEFORE** package installation or the package will not work in a
     dual DOS/WIN9X environment (it will work on WIN9X where the long file name
     (charset.alias) is available but it will not work on plain DOS where an
     alias like charset~1.ali will be visible instead of the 8.3 truncated
     short file name, this is charset.ali).

  - There are no DJGPP specific changes to the sources at all. Starting with
    version 1.6, the official GNU distribution has build-in DJGPP support so
    this package should compile out-of-the-box. Unfortunatly this is not true
    for the configuration stage. Due to the frequently changes introduced by the
    different autoconf/automake versions used by the GNU package maintainer
    and due to the amount of names that are not 8.3 clean, the configuration
    out-of-the-box will almost certainly fail, so you will always have to wait until
    a djgpp port have been released. This means that the files *.sed, config.site
    and *.bat must be adjusted to the actual requirements of the GNU package.
    As usual, all DJGPP specific stuff is located in /djgpp dir.

  - The package has been configurd and compiled with the configuration option:
     --enable-extra-encodings
    This option enables support for the following extra encodings:
      European languages
          CP{437,737,775,852,853,855,857,858,860,861,863,865,869,1125}
      Semitic languages
          CP864
      Japanese
          EUC-JISX0213, Shift_JISX0213, ISO-2022-JP-3
      Turkmen
          TDS565
      Platform specifics
          RISCOS-LATIN1
    This incrises the size of the library and may not be wished by every user.
    If this is the case you will have to reconfigure the sources by running the
    commands:
      del \djgpp\config.cache
      make distclean
      djgpp\config.bat
    with no option at all and recompile the package. If the above configuration
    option (--enaable-extra-encodings) is not given then the default library with
    no extra encodings support will be created.

  - Please note that this port has no NLS support at all. I have not tested if
    this package will work with the DJGPP port of the gettext 0.10.35 library.
    I am working on a port of the latest gettext library but this still may take
    some more time.

  Please read the documentation to become familiar with this product.


  The binary and source packages can be downloaded from ftp.delorie.com and
  mirrors as (timestamp: 2004-09-20):

  Libiconv 1.9.2 binary and man format documentation:
  ftp://ftp.delorie.com/pub/djgpp/current/v2gnu/licv192b.zip

  Libiconv 1.9.2 source:
  ftp://ftp.delorie.com/pub/djgpp/current/v2gnu/licv192s.zip

  Send suggestions and bug reports concerning the DJGPP port to
  comp.os.msdos.djgpp or djgpp AT delorie DOT com. Libiconv specific bugs
  must be reported to <bug-gnu-libiconv AT gnu DOT org>.


  Enjoy.

    Guerrero, Juan Manuel <st001906 AT hrz1 DOT hrz DOT tu-darmstadt DOT de>