On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 09:03:31PM +0100, Marc Espie wrote: > On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 07:41:35AM -0400, Juan Miscaro wrote: > > --- Paul Irofti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 11:22:53AM -0400, Nick Guenther wrote: > > > > On 11/1/07, Juan Miscaro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > Is there any priority for having OpenBSD support UTF8? > > > > > > > > utf-8 isn't an OS-level thing. You need to do it in every app. > > > > Googling, the first result brings up > > > > http://osdir.com/ml/os.openbsd.ports/2004-02/msg00376.html as an > > > > example. > > > > > > > > > > The sad thing is that the man pages don't mention that OpenBSD's > > > libc doesn't quite support locale, multibyte/wide char conversions > > > thus Unicode. > > > > > > E.g. if you look at mbstowcs(3) you'd say: okay, I can use that... > > > but looking at the code behind it you'll see its a pure stab that > > > does a simple memcpy from chars to ints (or wchar_ts as they > > > modernly call it in C99). > > You would REALLY be surprised how much of a difference this `simple > stub' does... it allows us to compile *a lot* of code that helps > support utf8 in ports land. > > And in reality, this part of OpenBSD is C99-compliant. There's > absolutely *nothing* in the standard that says you have to support any > locale except the C locale (which we do). > > If something has to be documented, it's probably that we just support > 8 bit locales for now... > > That said, this will eventually improve, and yes, this is a long road. > If it was only the C library, it would be rather simple... > > > > > To get back to the practical nature of my original request, if > > someone can let me know how to write French characters in a terminal > > (via an SSH connection) I would be very grateful. I would like to > > use a terminal emulator that uses UTF8 and I believe xterm does this > > but I can't find an OpenBSD package (or port) for it. > > > > // juan > > The xterm in OpenBSD can do it. It supports the utf8 option. > > You will need an editor that supports utf8 characters as well. Both > vim and emacs do. > > There are lots of programs in ports that have fairly decent level of > locale support. Heck, I can actually write japanese in OpenBSD, for > instance, and that's a *whole lot* more complicated than just french > characters. >
Would supporting UTF-8 in OpenBSD change the apparent speed at which it runs on older hardware? Debian Etch does UTF-8 by default and it crawls on my P-II; they told me it was because of UTF-8 and locales support. I changed the locale to C and removed the locales support and it speeded up dramatically. That type of tweaking of a base install isn't as easy in OpenBSD. Doug.
