On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 21:43 -0400, Warren Togami wrote:
One of our European engineers dwmw2 tried to improve the Unicode
situation in our squirrelmail with the current scripted conversion hack
in an attempt to workaround upstream squirrelmail's horrible
localization policy where their encodings are inconsistently mixed.
This improved things a bit only for some European languages, but not the
Asian languages.
Squirrelmail was a mess. It would confuse character sets whenever the
user quoted a mail with non-ASCII characters, if the character set of
the mail being quoted was different from the character set of the user.
By switching it to use UTF-8 throughout, we fixed that problem -- and in
doing so we made it conform to the Fedora policy of using UTF-8 for
everything -- a policy which we've had for a long time now. So I changed
all the locales to use UTF-8, changed their help text, etc.
It was slightly more complicated for the Asian locales, as Warren says.
The Korean help text was _supposed_ to be in EUC-KR encoding, but
'iconv' refused to convert it to UTF-8, claiming that it wasn't valid
EUC-KR to start with.
The Japanese support in Squirrelmail has 'EUC-JP' hard-coded in one or
two more places than the normal configuration files, and does the
confusing thing with EUC-JP in the Web interface and ISO-2022-JP in the
email. I _thought_ we'd switched both of those to UTF-8, but I'm afraid
I lack the knowledge of Japanese which would be necessary to do
meaningful tests.
Yamakawa-san, if you are able to spare some of your time to help us test
the behaviour of Squirrelmail packages in the Japanese locale, then that
would be very much appreciated.
As you may be well aware, it is currently infeasible to expect the
Asian
countries to use only Unicode encoding due to the constantly moving
standards and different glyphs in different languages using the same
code-points, among other problems.
I've heard it said that UTF-8 is insufficient for Asian locales, but
I've also heard it argued against -- I lack the knowledge to judge its
truthfulness. I had supposed that the Fedora policy of using UTF-8
everywhere was sane and correct -- are you suggesting that it really
isn't? I know there are Luddites even in Europe who object to UTF-8. I
ignore those too.
I'd prefer to fix the bugs and make sure Squirrelmail works correctly in
UTF-8 for all languages, rather than reverting to obsolescent character
sets for certain locales.
--
dwmw2