To: dbely at mail.ru
Cc: unison-users at yahoogroups.com, lablgtk at kaba.or.jp
Subject: Re: LablGTK/Windows and locale<->utf8 conversion
In-Reply-To: <adjbb5bn.fsf_-_ at mail.ru>
References: <20020825091217U.garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
	<adjbb5bn.fsf_-_@mail.ru>
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Message-Id: <20021224114705D.garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2002 11:47:05 +0900
From: Jacques Garrigue <garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
Lines: 33

From: Dmitry Bely <dbely at mail.ru>

> As you probably know, GTK+ 1.3 for Windows (and GTK+ 2.0 on all platforms)
> uses Unicode internally, while Ocaml itself uses ASCII codepages and
> locales. So under Windows we should convert all strings before passing them
> to LablGTK functions. (I recently discovered that when I tried to find out
> why Unison cannot correctly show Cyrillic file names under Windows. Unison
> people just hard coded the conversion always assuming the codepage
> 1252). So my question is: maybe integrating the transparent locale<->utf8
> conversion directly into LablGTK would make sense? IMHO it should be
> simple: just add g_utf8_to_locale()/g_free() and
> g_locale_to_utf8()/g_free() calls to all marshalling.

We just bumped into the same problem with the Gtk2 port.
So the answer is that there will be some support for conversion to and
from utf8 in lablgtk2, and it would be a good idea for unison to use
lablgtk2 when it becomes stable enough.

Handling unicode as a special case for windows in lablgtk1 would be
cumbersome, so it will have to wait for lablgtk2.

As for making it automatic, I have still doubts about the locale
approach. Actually, you might want to use several character codes in
the same program, and even use unicode characters in caml (btw, ucs4
is 31-bit wide, which seems nice). Also, glib has some special
functions for converting file names on windows, which seems to mean
that conversion may be subtle. So in the beginning conversions will be
left to the user.

Cheers,

        Jacques Garrigue