iconv issues, 4.2 branch

iconv issues, 4.2 branch

[Oliver Kiddle]

Having been away, I've not really followed the autoconf issues with
detecting iconv on Cygwin and Mac OS X but I thought I should mention
that GNU gettext comes with a file normally installed as
/usr/share/aclocal/iconv.m4. If someone wants to look at it, it might do
a better job of handling the different situations. It also detects the
varying prototypes which currently causes compiler warnings on some
systems.

I didn't use it at the time because it seemed overkill. It also appeared
to assume that iconv was essential, printing messages like "consider
installing GNU libiconv". This isn't really appropriate for zsh given
that, in many cases, \u/\U will work without needing iconv
(specifically  __STDC_ISO_10646__ plus wctomb and wchar_t available). So
it may just be that some ideas can be taken from iconv.m4.

Also, I've got a question about the zsh-4_2-patches branch? What is the
plan: is all the unicode stuff going to form a 4.3.0 release once ready
for testing with further 4.2.x releases coming on the 4_2 branch. It'd
be useful to know just what sort of changes we should be applying to
both branches and which only to HEAD.

Oliver

Re: iconv issues, 4.2 branch

[Peter Stephenson]

Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> Also, I've got a question about the zsh-4_2-patches branch? What is the
> plan: is all the unicode stuff going to form a 4.3.0 release once ready
> for testing with further 4.2.x releases coming on the 4_2 branch. It'd
> be useful to know just what sort of changes we should be applying to
> both branches and which only to HEAD.

zsh-4_2-patches will be bug fixes and minor upgrades only.  The Unicode
stuff won't be ported onto it.  There will probably be a 4.3.1 release
(the usual naming problem of what comes after 4.3.0-dev-*) when there's
something to release.

pws


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Re: iconv issues, 4.2 branch

[Peter A. Castro]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, Oliver Kiddle wrote:

> Having been away, I've not really followed the autoconf issues with
> detecting iconv on Cygwin and Mac OS X but I thought I should mention
> that GNU gettext comes with a file normally installed as
> /usr/share/aclocal/iconv.m4. If someone wants to look at it, it might do
> a better job of handling the different situations. It also detects the
> varying prototypes which currently causes compiler warnings on some
> systems.

Thanks for the hint!  This seems like just the thing to use, instead of
the current method for finding iconv()/libiconv().

> I didn't use it at the time because it seemed overkill. It also appeared

>From the looks of it, it's along the lines of what I was originally
hacking into configure.ac, but didn't really want to spend lots of time
tweeking it to prefection.

> to assume that iconv was essential, printing messages like "consider
> installing GNU libiconv". This isn't really appropriate for zsh given
> that, in many cases, \u/\U will work without needing iconv
> (specifically  __STDC_ISO_10646__ plus wctomb and wchar_t available). So
> it may just be that some ideas can be taken from iconv.m4.

It doesn't really seem to imply that iconv is essential (the word
"consider" doesn't mean mandatory).  It also doesn't look like it would
stop configure if iconv isn't found (haven't tried it yet, so don't know
for sure, but I don't see anything obvious in the code).  It does appear
to provide a way to disable searching for iconv (via
--without-libiconv-prefix).  I'll play with this a bit and see if it
might be a more complete method of searching for iconv under Linux and
Cygwin.

Thanks again!

> Also, I've got a question about the zsh-4_2-patches branch? What is the
> plan: is all the unicode stuff going to form a 4.3.0 release once ready
> for testing with further 4.2.x releases coming on the 4_2 branch. It'd
> be useful to know just what sort of changes we should be applying to
> both branches and which only to HEAD.
>
> Oliver

-- 
Peter A. Castro <doctor@fruitbat.org> or <Peter.Castro@oracle.com>
	"Cats are just autistic Dogs" -- Dr. Tony Attwood