On 24.05.2010 20:10, Greg Ames wrote: > On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Branko Čibej <br...@xbc.nu > <mailto:br...@xbc.nu>> wrote: > > > This is very, very wrong, because we use the ctypes for other things, > not just for string literals. > > > I'm aware that ctypes are used for other things. I don't see why > using APR's portable version of ctypes across the board would break > anything. I couldn't find a reason why subversion requires a custom > version of ctypes which happens to be non-portable.
Because we assume all strings are in a subset of UTF-8, and those ctypes are intended for such strings. If you suddenly start using EBCDIC-specific "portable" ctypes, then other parts of the code are likely to break horribly. At least, IIRC; it's been a long time since I was there. > > There is a very deep-rooted assumption > within the code that inside the library, all strings are encoded in (a > subset of) UTF-8, and that implies that we expect string literals > to be > in ascii. > > > There certainly are a lot of string literals that are assumed to be > UTF-8, agreed. > > > Others have ported Subversion to EBCDIC systems > > > It was OS/400 (aka. iSeries). OS/390 was an earlier brand name for z/OS. (ISTR now that you had something to do with thosat port, right?) > but IIRC they always told their compilers to treat the source as > ASCII. There was a port that used some sort of #pragma or > preprocessing, > I don't recall which, to handle string literals, but it died off > because > it was too easy to just tell the compiler to do the right thing. > > > printf style format strings and args for other (but not all) library > functions are expected to have native encoding on z/OS, so using the > #pragmas is not as easy as I would like. Oh ouch. That's going to make things realy evil. Imagine, our translations are coded in UTF-8 and quite a few printf-style format strings come from there. However ... if I'm not too much mistaken, we use APR's formatter functions almost everywhere -- I believe the notable exception are the command-line output functions. Are you sure you can't just tickle those, makeing them (elegantly) z/OS-specific? For example, we do some special magic just for the console output on Windows. -- Brane
