Re: [bug-gnu-libiconv] Missing support for ISO-6937

[Bruno Haible]

Marian Ďurkovič wrote:
> ISO6937 is used not only in DVB, but also for X.400, X.500 and other
> telecommunication services.

X.400 and X.500 are pretty specialized applications. Wikipedia says that
X.500 was used until ca. 2002. [1]

Teletext (ETS 300 706) uses a modified version of ISO 6937-2 ([2] p. 116,
120, 122, 124).

So, really, unmodified ISO 6937 appears to be hardly used.

> Anyway, the feeling on vlc-devel mailinglist was, that implementing
> conversion routines in VLC is suboptimal and I do believe that having
> ISO6937 support in libiconv would help several other applications besides
> VLC itself

Hardly. When I look at uses of the string "ISO_6937" in Google codesearch,
I find many more references to character set converters (including glibc)
than users of this encoding. This means that it would be more economic to
support this encoding in the specialized applications than in the character
set converters.

Bruno

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.500
[2] http://www.themm.net/~mihu/linux/saa7146/specs/ets_300706e01p.pdf