[illumos-Developer] webrev: POSIX style localedef & multibyte encoding support

[Owen Shepherd]

On 3 Oct 2010, at 10:08, Garrett D'Amore wrote:

> 
> 1) I have added locale data for the English locales that were missing,
> and eliminated mklocale and friends.  (I removed US-ASCII without
> replacing it.  If you want 7-bit support- use POSIX or C locale.
> Otherwise, you really want ISO-8859-1 or -15.) 
> 

Is the US-ASCII locale likely to be stored in any data files? Should the system perhaps automatically migrate to the POSIX or C locale if it is requested?

(I admit my POSIX/C locale knowledge is lacking)

> Once I integrate this change, it will be a fairly trivial matter to add
> support for pretty much any locale you like. :-)  Any of about 372 UTF-8
> locales are easy.  Any 8859 or KOI8 locale is easy.  Other encodings are
> easy *if* I can get a character map for them.  GB18030 is probably the
> most painful of those.)

Would the ICU project's character maps work? They have one for GB18030, and its a pretty important locale from a product point of view, since it is required to support it in products sold in China (ICU is released by IBM under a BSD-like license, IIRC)

	- Owen