[fpc-devel] fpcsrc/rtl/unix/video.pp

[Tomas Hajny]

ik wrote:
> On 11/3/06, Micha Nelissen <micha at neli.hopto.org> wrote:
>> Tomas Hajny wrote:
>> > Does anybody here have an idea how to address that issue in Unix/Linux
>> > environment (like an environment variable similar to TERM, etc.)? I
>> can
>>
>> The part after the dot in $LANG. It's possible though that there is no
>> dot, no idea what to do, maybe assume iso-8859-1 ?
>
> No, that will be really bad idea to assume iso-8859-1 . It really
> depends on the country and language code. For example :
>
> LANG=he_IL.UTF-8
 .
 .
> If I'll remove the UTF-8 it will be he_IL regardless... but the
> encoding will be iso8859-8 ... If you will place iso8859-1, it will
> stop working .. I mean you could not use the language your system is
> set to.
>
> Any language out there that does not use iso8859-1 will suffer from that
> ...

We were discussing the default behaviour used if no information about
encoding is available. This only means that those who cannot use the
default (ISO 8859-1) have to make sure to provide the real information,
otherwise it just isn't guaranteed to work correctly. I don't think this
should be a problem, but I'm open to your arguments if you think
otherwise.

BTW, note that one can always set environment variable even just for a
particular session (e.g. in a shell script starting the particular
binary), so even if it isn't possible to change the default for some
reason (e.g. due to other programs running on the same machine under the
same user), it should be still useable (responding to Marco's comment
about old machines here).

Tomas