* Bruno Haible: > Paul Eggert asked: >> > By the way, how important is it to support awful encodings like >> > shift-JIS that contain bytes that look like '\'? If we don't have to >> > support these encodings any more, things get a bit easier. > > Here we are talking about locale encodings, and Shift_JIS (as well as > SHIFT_JISX0213) are not usable as a locale encoding in glibc. See e.g. > [1], [2]. > > That's the reason why no Shift_JIS locale is listed in > glibc/localedata/SUPPORTED. [3]
> [1] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3140 > [2] https://sourceware.org/legacy-ml/libc-alpha/2000-10/msg00311.html > [3] https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=localedata/SUPPORTED We used to have a fully supported product based on the original Shift-JIS. It did not require glibc changes (we package both localedef and the locale sources, so it's easy to build custom locales), but other GNU components had to be patched. > Florian Weimer wrote: >> There is a Shift-JIS variant which is ASCII-transparent (Windows-31J, >> it's also specified by WhatWG/HTML5), so from a glibc point of view, it >> would be just an ordinary charset like any other. >> >> But feedback we have received is that the users who want Shift-JIS >> really want the original thing. >> >> We do not presently support either variant downstream, but one potential >> way forward would be to turn Windows-31J into a fully supported glibc >> charset with a corresponding ja_JP locale (which would imply downstream >> support as well), and just hope that it displaces the original Shift-JIS >> in the future. > > I don't think there's a real need for that. In the years 1995 ... 2005 > there was a lot of resistence against Unicode in Japan, because > Unicode maps several slightly differently looking glyph images to the > same glyph/character (even for Western encodings, for example the > Polish accents look a bit different than the French ones), and - at > the time - Unicode did not have means to disambiguate these, thus > people complained about "characters are rendered incorrectly if you > use Unicode". This has been resolved for more than 10 years already. We saw commercial demand for Shift-JIS much later than that. I think an official Windows-31J-based ja_JP would still be welcomed at this point. A Windows-31J locale could be added to localedata/SUPPORTED. We have not done that yet because someone wanted to look into alignment between Windows, HTML/WhatWG and what we currently have in the source tree, but that hasn't happened yet, unfortunately. Thanks, Florian -- Red Hat GmbH, https://de.redhat.com/ , Registered seat: Grasbrunn, Commercial register: Amtsgericht Muenchen, HRB 153243, Managing Directors: Charles Cachera, Brian Klemm, Laurie Krebs, Michael O'Neill
