On 05/11/2007 09:25 AM, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
On 05/10/07 20:04, Udo Richter wrote:
... VDR development would speed up, if Klaus would delegate more work to other talented coders, and doing more review instead of coding most of it himself.
Well, right now I'm dealing with the UTF-8 stuff, which is something I myself don't need at all. But unfortunately the patch(es) for this can't just be applied as it, because from what I've seen so far there it is assumed that the whole program is totally going UTF-8 - which it is *not*. I still want to be able to run it on a pure and clean iso8859-1 system. So I have to painstakingly go through the whole thing and take care that it only does UTF-8 if so requested - and that's a lot more work than just applying a patch...
What's wrong with vdr using UTF-8 internally if it makes the code simpler? Offhand I could only imagine two places where using a different external encoding would be required and that's file names and tty i/o. Stuff like epg.data and svdrp should better use UTF-8 as you don't need to add extra meta data options to specify the encoding.
It's very simple: I don't like it! The two languages I can handle can be perfectly well represented with iso8859-1, so I just don't want to have to go through all the hassle with UTF-8. To me, a character is a character is a byte is a byte. Period.
Now, I do see that there are people out there who can't represent their language with single byte character sets, or want to be able to handle more languages than a single character set can cope with, so I am going to make VDR able to handle UTF-8. But only in a way that allows (at least) me to completely turn this stuff off. Whenever I install a new version of SUSE Linux, the first this I always do is turn off UTF-8. I just don't want it and don't need it.
Klaus