Re: X11R7.5 and C.UTF-8

[Andy Koppe <andy.koppe@gmail.com>]

2009/12/3 Linda Walsh:
> C.UTF_8 doesn't exist.

Well, guess what: it does in Cygwin 1.7, and it's the default locale.
And it's also in the next Debian:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=522776.

Cygwin 1.7 also supports "C.ISO-8859-1", "C.CP1252", ...


> Might want to try 'Console' nstead of using mintty.  Not perfect either, but
> fewer compatibility problems that I've noticed.

Care to provide examples, so they can be fixed? Or are you just bitter
about having to tick a box to switch backspace to ^H?

'Console' is better for native Windows programs, because, well, it's a
console, whereas mintty is more suited for Unix programs, because it's
an xterm-compatible tty.


> You can't have "C" and "UTF-8", because C means no encoding (default).
> UTF-8 IS an encoding, so they are mutually exclusive.

>From http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap07.html,
§7.2:

"The tables in Locale Definition describe the characteristics and
behavior of the POSIX locale for data consisting entirely of
characters from the portable character set and the control character
set. For other characters, the behavior is unspecified."

This means that characters 0..127 have to be treated as ASCII, but
beyond that an implementation can do what it wants. And on Cygwin 1.7,
plain "C" actually does imply UTF-8, which happily is
backward-compatible with ASCII.

Not that that is much to do with "C.UTF-8", which is a separate locale
in any case. The meaning of locale strings is up to the OS, e.g. with
the Windows C runtime you get stuff like "English_United States.1252".
And 'C.<charset>' on Cygwin is intended to mean "the semantics of the
C locale, but with the specified charset".

However, since the 'C.<charset>' format is unlikely to be recognised
by remote systems, it's recommended to set a "real" locale such as
'en_US.UTF-8'.


> I don't
> know under what circumstances "C" might imply UTF-8.  If the definition
> of "C" changes?  It might be easier than changing "c" (as used in physics).

How droll.

Andy

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