Re: UTF-8 and some issues...

Hi Andreas,
sorry for being late with the answer.

On Tuesday, 19 December, 2006 2:44:37 PM Andreas Nitsche <[email protected]> wrote:
>Yes, please give me this advice. I've free time from Februar till March.
>There should be enough time to have a look at this.

This is what I could understand about the issue:
ncurses has a wide-character implementation of its methods and you can use them by linking to ncursesw instead of ncurses. The wide-char methods are named differently, but provide the same functionality. (for instance: getch() is get_wch() )
So what needs to be done is to substitute all the old character-handling ncurses methods with the wchar versions. This happens mainly in kkconsui and kkstrtext (kutils). There is a lot of rewrite needed becausa you'll also need to use wchar_t instead of char and you'll have to update all the methods and their interfaces. Very important is character counting and space counting: wchars may be longer than one char (non-ascii chars are for sure), but you also have to remember that not all wchars are displayed as one position. So you'll have to use wcwidth and wcswidth for positioning the cursor.
That's, more or less, what need to be done with the UI. I can assure that there is quite some work. Maybe it would be better to redesign completely the interface of these libraries...
When this will be done, you'll have to check that the messages to be sent are correctly encoded. There is already some method for an UTF-8 conversion, but I did not look into it. That will be another problem...
That's about all I know about this, if you have more questions just ask, I'll try to answer if I can.

But before coding, I think there are a couple of reflections whcih should be made: this package is not mantained anymore. The code is growing old, new issues arise and no fix is being produced. Gentoo has removed centericq from portage, others will follow, I'm quite sure of it.It looks like there is no way to have a CVS access, so if we are to revive centericq, we'll have to bring it somewhere else, at least the CVS repository. Or we could start from scratch with another project, make it cleaner and with internationalization support by design. I'm open about suggestions and different ideas on this matter...
BTW: By no mean my intentions are to fork or steal this project to anyone, I think that centericq is a great app and I am thankful to anyone who worked on it because I really use it. Yet it needs some care right now and, IMHO, we can only move the CVS elsewhere or restart from scratch.

I would be glad to hear anyone's opinion

Stéphane
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