On 1/14/21 2:00 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
We saw commercial demand for Shift-JIS much later than that.

Yes, I see Red Hat has a product enhancement for that, for coreutils, dated 2019.[1]

Shift-JIS is still very much alive and kicking in Japan in its own circles. Even DBCS EBCDIC is still used among old mainframe applications.[2] I very much doubt whether we need to worry about DBCS EBCDIC in GNU software, though.

Shift-JIS is a closer call as it's used a lot more than DBCS EBCDIC. However, my worry is that good support for non-ASCII-safe encodings like Shift-JIS is hard to do, and that any such support we'd add to Gnulib/coreutils/etc. would not only increase maintenance costs and reduce runtime performance, but also would be buggy in many oddball corner cases (and this would have security implications).

[1] https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2019:0008

[2] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SS4PJT_6.0.0/cd_zos/cdzos_admin/ZOS_Overview_of_DBCS.html

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