Re: Should glibc provide a builtin C.UTF-8 locale?

[Mike Frysinger <vapier at gentoo dot org>]

On 11 Feb 2015 16:57, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> > Is anyone opposed to having glibc contain a builtin C.UTF-8 locale?
> > This locale would have the same rules as the C locale when set for
> > LC_ALL.
> 
> In reading followups it seems this point wasn't entirely clear.  I took it to 
> mean that "C.utf8" is like "C" except with UTF-8 encoding, so that (for example) 
> there are only 26 alphabetic characters in "C.utf8".  This should allow a 
> compact implementation, which uses the same (small) character tables for both 
> the C and the C.utf8 locales.
> 
> Others, however, seem to be thinking that the new locale would use bigger tables 
> that encompass all Unicode characters, so that there would be thousands of 
> alphabetic characters.  This also sounds useful, for applications that need to 
> know whether a character is a Unicode letter regardless of language.  Many 
> applications, though, don't need this extra information, and would work well 
> with the more-compact approach.
> 
> This suggests that we add two locales: "C.utf8" could be a minimal locale that 
> is as close as possible to the "C" locale while adding UTF-8, and "i18n.utf8" 
> could be a bigger locale, basically the i18n locale of ISO/IEC TR 30112.  The 
> "C.utf8" locale could easily be built into glibc for performance, just as "C" 
> is; the "i18n.utf8" locale could use tables compiled with localedef like all the 
> other locales.

wrt compatibility with other systems, do we have a sense for the direction POSIX 
is heading ?  i also vaguely recall OS X supports something like this ?  should 
we proactively attempt to harmonize here ?
-mike

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature