[illumos-Developer] BSD iconv (was Closed-bin accords of the OpenSolaris conference... )

[Joerg Schilling]

"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at damore.org> wrote:

> This is great news.  I would have *preferred* to pick up a FreeBSD
> implementation, but it looked like FreeBSD's version had staganted to
> the point of being replaced with GNU iconv.  Which is not acceptable to
> me for a variety of reasons.
>
> If we can use a FreeBSD implementation, it will help a *lot*.

Our problem is that we have iconv_open(), iconv_close() and iconv()
in libc and that we miss the iconv program and various loadable libraries
from /usr/lib/iconv/

> Joerg, would you be willing to take a look at this?  If the code looks
> basically usable and free of major bugs, and like it might be
> maintainable (or someone in this group wants to step up to help with
> maintenance), then I'd say this is a way forward.

The program iconv from *BSD is really simple, but it depends on non-standard 
extensions to the iconv_open()/iconv_close()/iconv() implementation.

> I'm not a big fan of the pluggable shared library that Solaris has for
> this stuff.

I am not sure what you are talking about. If you are talking about the plugins 
for various codesets, then it may have advantages. Our problem is that we miss
these plugins. I should note that the function iconv() is somehow connected to 
various mb* functions.

Our problem is that most of the working code is not inside libc but inside the 
loadable libraries that we don't have.

It seems that we need to decide whether we partly need to give up binary 
compatibility.

It is obvious that we most likely will never be able to run a tr(1) or iconv(1) 
binary from Snorcle Solaris. In order to decide how to proceed, we need to know
which non-hidden interfaces from Snorcle Solaris have to be called "officially
supported interfaces" and which not.

Even if we only like to support the same code-set paris for iconv -f xxx -t yyy, 
we may need to put a lot of effort into internationalization.

Jörg

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