Re: UTF-8 capable fmt(1)

[Kamil Rytarowski <n54%gmx.com@localhost>]

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On 09.01.2016 01:03, David Young wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 09, 2016 at 12:58:25AM +0100, Thomas Klausner wrote:
>> I suggest we follow the lead of other and replace our 30 year old
>> fmt with a 15 year old one :)
> 
> Yes, please.

Please hold on.

I don't like the UTF-8 movement in OpenBSD.

1. I have an impression that it's basically moving the focus from
ASCII to narrowed-down UTF-8, while there are plenty of other locales
and character systems.

I need iso-latin-2, at times ucs-2, utf-16 and others.

2. They keep reinventing functions to replace the traditional ones
from libc, like ctype(3).. in every tool in their userland. This is
messing the code.

3. I don't like the movement towards new idioms 'display length of
word' 'display length of space after word'. It's not easy to
understand correctly them without the context.

I prefer to keep 30-years old fmt(1) than messed one. I think there is
better to move to a locale-aware functions from an external library
like icu [1] (mit-licensed) or abstract the implementation details/new
idioms with our own library in libc.

The diff in fmt(1) after adding UTF-8 support:
http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/fmt/fmt.c.diff?r1=1
.33&r2=1.36&f=h

I wouldn't like to maintain such userland. I don't know how about
fmt(1).. but other tools after(during) the migration (like tmux) were
incapable to handle bidirectional alphabets.

[1] http://site.icu-project.org/
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