On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 2:54 PM, Jürgen Hestermann <[email protected]> wrote: > You may have a false impression of how Free Pascal/Lazarus is used by most > people. > At least I did not wait until the current version to use Unicode (and long > paths) > for file names and others. I think many did so. > Therefore we have build our own infrastructure/functions to work with the > Windows unicode API functions. In this case using "DisableUTF8RTL" would > be no option as it bombs us back to ANSI/short paths and still requires to > do code changes. > That's not good.
I don't understand how DisableUTF8RTL bombs your system because it is the backwards compatible thing. If your system worked with FPC 2.6.4, it should work with FPC 3.0 + DisableUTF8RTL. If it does not work then there are bugs which should be fixed. Do you mean the A- / W- versions of WinAPI calls by the short/long path thing? Enabling or disabling the UTF8RTL does not affect WinAPI calls. It is a separate issue. > So we need to live with the changes and understand the logic behind it > (which IMO is much more complicated than before). The amount of time we have > to invest > is unforseeable for us and therefore many get frustrated (especially, > because the documentation is poor). > > I have done the changes to (some) of my programs now and it works quite okay > but it was a hard time until this was finished (and I still don't know > whether bugs lurk here and there). > > >> I don't know why you always find excuses to complain. It is not nice. >> Please stop it. > > Please stop ignoring and gibing those who have problems with the new unicode > types. > I know how they feel and such statements are not helpful. > If you don't want to help then ignore these mails. Excuse me! Are you really saying I have not helped with the Unicode issues? I am amazed the system works already as well as it does. > I know that those who have already worked on this for a long time > cannot understand why not everybody instantly knows how the new > codepage aware ansistrings work but be assured that for many this is > completely new. So bare with our frustration and better ignore such > mails than revile the writers. In my mail I explicitly asked for feedback so we can still improve this system. Yes, this is a very complicated issue. For example I am at my limits of understanding / not-understanding the details, but still I tried to improve things instead of complaining about how poorly the voluntary developers have done the job. I have worked on the DisableUTF8RTL feature although I don't use it myself. Fortunately there were helpful people like "michl" (forum name) who fixed bugs. I also wrote some wiki pages. They are not perfect but they are better than nothing. Now we support 3 ways with Lazarus 1.6 : 1. The improved UTF-8 system with FPC 3.0. The default codepage of AnsiString = UTF-8. 2. Backwards compatible system with FPC 3.0 by defining DisableUTF8RTL. AnsiString uses system codepage. 3. Continue using FPC 2.6.4. All string types and encodings are 100% compatible with earlier versions. The 4. way will be a Delphi compatible UTF-16 sometime in future. How to improve the 3 supported ways? The issues I know are that FPC libs still use the old WinAPI calls in some places, and the TFormatSettings separators issue. Are there other bugs? How to solve them? Juha -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
