Re: [RFC] win-iconv

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Nov 21 20:06, Yaakov (Cygwin/X) wrote:
> Fedora's MinGW toolchain has used win-iconv[1] instead of GNU libiconv
> since F16.  win-iconv uses the Win32 APIs to do the heavy lifting,
> making it almost 50 times smaller than GNU libiconv.  It handles most of
> the same codesets as libiconv and even some the latter does not
> (including the glibc aliases UTF8/UTF16 for UTF-8/UTF-16 etc.).  I have
> attached a normalized diff between `iconv -l` from libiconv and current
> win-iconv.  OTOH, it doesn't provide all of the API extensions of GNU
> libiconv, but neither does glibc.

The downside is that it doesn't support some of the codesets supported
by Cygwin, for instance big5, euccn, eucjp, euckr, georgian-ps, tis-620.

> We could even go one step further and incorporate win-iconv (which is
> Public Domain) directly into Cygwin itself, which would provide greater
> compatibility with glibc and save patches to several packages which
> don't use portable ways (e.g. AM_ICONV) for searching for iconv(3), or
> use $(LIBICONV) when they should use $(LTLIBICONV), etc.  This would add
> about 18KB to cygwin1.dll but save almost 1MB of memory and ImageBase
> space for hundreds of packages.

Sounds like a worthy goal to me.  But it really should at least support
the codesets also supported by Cygwin.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat