Re: UTF-8 practically vs. theoretically in the VFS API

Eric W. Biederman
2004-02-22T15:41:57Z

Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org> writes:

> Alex Belits wrote:
> > > No, I think hacking the terminal I/O is the best bet here. Then _all_
> > > programs which currently work with UTF-8 terminals, which is rapidly
> > > becoming most of them, will work the same with both kinds of terminal,
> > > and the illusion of perfection will be complete and beautiful.
> >
> > UTF-8 terminals (and variable-encoding terminals) alreay exist,
> > gnome-terminal is one of them. They are, of course, bloated pigs, but I
> > would rather have the bloat and idiosyncrasy in the user interface where
> > it belongs.
>
> Yes, I am using it right now. The fancy characters work well in it.
> Problem is, sometimes I have to use a non-UTF-8 terminal, and I would
> naturally like to access my files in the same way.

Basically I think this is just a matter of modifying telnetd and
sshd so that for the display they follow the users locale,
at least in cooked mode.

Does anyone have a good grasp what the exact semantics should be and
where the translation should happen? I know we need to delay the
translation as long as possible so we can get binary streams flowing
through these protocols?

I guess my question is when do we know the information is going to
a terminal so we should translate it?

Eric