Re: The C locale

[Lapo Luchini <lapo at lapo dot it>]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> This way, the non-ASCII needs of most users are covered
> out-of-the-box [...]
> Windows filenames show up correctly in Cygwin as long as they're
> limited to the ANSI codepage.

I fail to see how that is a desiderable thing.
Filesystem is UTF-16, Cygwin is now Unicode-aware, but anything that
doesn't fit ANSI is thrown away for the sake of retro-compatibility of
Cygwin-1.5 which was not Unicode-aware?

As a user, the ability to show correctly formatted UTF-8 filenames is
one of the features I most appreciated in Cygwin-1.7 and reverting that
would be a serious setback... even writing that in a ChangeLog would be
a bit troublesome... "we added support for Unicode - except you can't
use for anything you couldn't already do before when it was not there,
since we're using ANSI as an intermediate format anyways"?

> For example, start nano in a UTF-8 locale, enter a few umlauts, and
> move the cursor around, and you'll see some weird effects.

IMHO a bit of "weird effects" while moving cursor are a much less severe
problem that being unable to write the filename "like I think it is".
Using ANSI, anything over U+100 Unicode would be an ugly ^N-encoded
3-bytes-per-char ugly stuff which no human can "see" as the filename he
intended to use.

just my 2c

-- 
Lapo Luchini - http://lapo.it/

âYou don't have to distrust the government to want to use cryptography.â
(Phil Zimmermann)

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