"Ted Unangst" writes: > Fixing citrus is a pretty massive effort in itself. I'd prefer to see the > replacement code prove itself as a separate API first, then we can remove > citrus and change the wchar functions to use the new code. I'm less confident > in a "meet in the middle" effort where we convert to wchar while simultanesou > ly > hoping the wchar code gets better.
So how about a compromise? Use wchar_t where necessary, and no more than that. After several programs get converted, come up with a better wchar_t-free API, because at that time it becomes clear what kind of functions are necessary. > In the mean time, maybe we should also look at a few more utilities. We seem > to have some intuition that mbwidth() etc. will be useful, and maybe mbvis(), > but we don't really know. So far I've poked at ul, rs, and ls. Then we've gon > e > around in circles polishing those particular turds, but not much effort was > spent looking at other utilities. schwarze@, zhuk@ and czarkoff@ (and maybe others) spent time looking at assorted utilities and classifying them. The difference between ls and the other programs you mentioned is that it calculates *and uses* column widths of frequently-UTF-8 data. Counting codepoints isn't adequate--most UTF-8 filenames on my system contain double-width characters. Until we come up with a better API, the *only* way to check widths is wcwidth() and friends. And the best way to come up with a better replacement is to have real programs that count columns. Or would you prefer to add a full range of Unicode width tables to ls? > What about wc? file? du? top? cut? vis??? > > Will adding utf-8/unicode support to each of those look the same? Or will > every utility be different? Again--there are a few broad categories that will require different approaches. ls(1) is in the "needs to count columns" category. > Additionally, I think all diffs to fix ls should be accompanied by before > and after ktrace output. :) That's a snappy line, and one that exposes a real problem in our wchar_t implementation, but it doesn't help ls work in ~/anime/...
