Re: UTF-8, OSTA-UDF [why?], Unicode, and miscellaneous gibberish

Andrew E. Mileski (aem@netcom.ca)
Tue, 26 Aug 1997 19:19:28 -0400 (EDT)


> while not very many people (for or against Unicode
> support .. where? in the kernel? is that what this is about?)

Yes. So I naievely thought when I mentioned OSTA compressed Unicode
that I am working with in a UDF filesystem driver.

> The main point I'd like to make, though, is this: this is the
> linux-kernel mailing list; we should try to restrict ourselves to
> discussions pertinent to the kernel.

Agreed!

> ...it seems
> reasonable for the kernel to support more than 256 characters. In the
> interests of a small kernel (both source and binary), whatever encoding is
> used should be space-efficient and not require large processing routines
> (eg for character begin-end detection). Unicode and UTF-8 provide this,
> while still not having excessively large overhead for unusual character
> storage; most 'native' encodings that support more than 256 characters
> don't have this advantage.

This will be INTERNAL TO THE KERNEL (for now) if I understand correctly?

Okay, so shall we take a vote on UTF-8 now, and adapt where necessary
the kernel to use it?

What does Linus think?

--
Andrew E. Mileski   mailto:aem@netcom.ca