Re: [bug-gnu-libiconv] [PATCH] Add a few useful aliases

[Daniel Richard G.]

Hi Bruno,

On Mon, 2008 Apr 07 22:37:08 +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> 
> Daniel Richard G. wrote:
> > The attached patch adds a few encoding-name aliases supported by the glibc 
> > and Solaris implementations of iconv(1), and uncomments the "UTF8" alias. 
> 
> Aliases should be reduced to a minimum. Adding more aliases causes more
> software to appear broken.

I am concerned here with iconv-the-program, not iconv-the-function-call. Is 
there a way to add aliases that are visible only in the former case?

I have a toolchain that works with glibc iconv(1) and Solaris iconv(1), and 
relies extensively on these aliases. Aliases in general may lead to 
headaches in programmatic usage, but for the command-line tool not to 
recognize e.g. "utf8" when other well-established implementations do shows 
a rather troubling emphasis of pedantry over interoperability.

> > These have been sorely missed by my employer, who takes the view that the 
> > hyphens in the canonical names are redundant.
> 
> Then all software would also have to support U-T-F8 and similar names. No!
> It's pointless.

Perhaps the word I should have used is "superfluous."

My employer makes use of files named e.g. "en.utf8.dic.txt", 
"en.iso8859-1.dic.txt". The toolchain I referred to above uses GNU Make, 
and with pattern rules, it's easy to write a rule that passes the 
encoding-part of the filename directly as an argument to -f or -t.

The files could have been named e.g. "en.utf-8.dic.txt" and 
"en.iso-8859-1.dic.txt", but why? The extra hyphen is useless. On the flip 
side, "en.iso88591.dic.txt" is too short---something is needed to separate 
sets of digits, or else the result is ambiguous.

In any event, I did not ask for "U-T-F8" to be recognized. That's silly.


--Daniel


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