Re: Improved console UTF-8 support for the Linux kernel?

["David Gómez" <david@pleyades.net>]

Hi Simon ;),

> The current UTF-8 keyboard input (for the console) of the Linux kernel
> does not support  "composing" or writing characters with accents.

Yes, i recently find it out when trying to switch all my system to
UTF-8. But the patch from Chris you mention below works very well
for me (and for anybody that needs to type compose characters for
languages based in the latin1 encoding i guess).

> affects quite a few languages that require accents (French, German,
> Danish, Swedish?, Greek, cyrillic-based?, others?.). 

Spanish ;))

> Chris Heath has a set of incremental patches
> (http://chris.heathens.co.nz/linux/utf8.html) to enhance Unicode for the
> console.
> I noticed that he contacted this list in May 2003
> (http://seclists.org/lists/linux-kernel/2003/May/7956.html) but
> unfortunatelly the discussion was diverted to coding styles.

Chris told me in the utf-8 mailing list that he doesn't think his patch to
make the kernel generate UTF-8 characters in the compose tables will be
included in the main kernel. Basically because is not a full solution that
cover all the cases... But there is nothing better, so maybe it will be a
good idea to include it. Current state is, for 2.6 kernel, text console
is broken in UTF-8 mode because it cannot generate UTF-8 composed characters.

> Is there an interest for re-submission of mentioned patches for
> inclusion in the kernel (yeah, provided coding style is "normalised")?

At least, I am _really_ interested :)

regards,

-- 
David Gómez                                      Jabber ID: davidge@jabber.org