Hello. I would like to ask that the decision to reject Mr Suzuki Hisao's patch to include UTF-8 file name support in Cygwin was reconsidered. I've read the discussion between Mr Suzuki Hisao and Mr Christopher Faylor (cygwin-patches mail list, thread "UTF-8 Cygwin", 26 Jun - 06 Jul 2006), and Christopher's arguments didn't convince me: as it appears, it was mostly an issue with function wrappers not being a solution as clean and elegant as the ideal. The alternative would be a major redesign in Cygwin that would require considerable additional efforts which no one seems to be willing to undertake at this time.
I am not a Cygwin developer and therefore I'm not the most qualified person to tell whether the decision to reject the patch was appropriate. However, as an European user of Cygwin, I'd like to stress that UTF-8 file name support is a major issue that deserves attention. I believe that there is a very large community of non English-speaking users that could benefit from that patch right now. Users who, like me, have to be constantly renaming files to use the English alphabet in order for their bash scripts to work. Here's how my "ls -l" results show up: ls: ?????? - ????????.txt: No such file or directory ls: ?????? - ????????.txt: No such file or directory ls: ?????? - ????????.txt: No such file or directory ls: ??????04.doc: No such file or directory The question marks appear in place of Cyrillic characters (Russian) and sometimes in place of some letters with diacritics. With the UTF-8 patch and using the proper xterm flags and fonts, it works fine. So unless there are really major flaws with the patch implementation, it would be a great contribution to the offical Cygwin. In the future, the function wrappers could be cleaned up, perhaps as part of a major Cygwin redesign. Cheers, Paulo _______________________________________________________ Novidade no Yahoo! Mail: receba alertas de novas mensagens no seu celular. Registre seu aparelho agora! http://br.mobile.yahoo.com/mailalertas/ -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/