[fpc-devel] RTL and Unicode filenames operations.

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, dmitry boyarintsev said:
> On Tue, Mar 21, 2010 at 2:01 PM, Marco van de Voort
> <http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=15795> wrote:
> > I'll reiterate my opinion that first a decision about what the working stringtype of the RTL will be.
> > IMHO there is no decent solution till there is a real utf-8 type (read cpnewstr)
> 
> The whole reason for the package, is not to wait for cpnewstr being implemented.
> That's the point that package's interface uses UnicodeString, rather
> than ambiguous "String" type (that's currently system dependent).

Yes. Which is no problem for the package. But it is a reason to not include
it. 
 
> > Note that the recent update does not tackle my main gripe at all, the main units interface is still UTF-16 on Unix,
> > it just translates it to UTF-8 in the backend.
> Yes, it does so and i see no problems here. The package also converts
> UTF-16 to ansi encoding for Win9x.
> Converting string from UTF16 to UTF8 (or any other encoding) is not
> much time penalty comparing to the time of the file operation itself.

Sure. But that still doesn't mean UTF-16 is the ideal choice.

> Btw, the current RTL implementation also forces a user to convert a
> "string" type to utf8, to work correctly on Unixes for unicode names.

Currently there is no unicode support. The point is rather that I don't want
to commit an halve one, and be stuck with it (and all kinds of packages
"just" using it) forever.