Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/2001/07/31/19:11:19
-: > NLS support requires translation between different character sets,
-: > like between ISO-8859-1 and the corresponding DOS codepage 850 (to
-: > pick an example that is relevant for DJGPP). Each such conversion
-: > requires 2 tables: from the source charset to Unicode and from Unicode
-: > to the target charset. Taking into consideration how many charsets
-: > are supported, you can imagine the sheer volume of the tables this
-: > requires. All of those tables are sitting inside the program.
-:
-: Exactly - I consider this a bad design decision, coming from the
-: standpoint 'It's a shared library anyway', which simply doesn't hold
-: true on all platforms (even though libiconv's configure.in tries to
-: disable static builds IIRC). It seems to make much more sense to have
-: data files in $prefix/share/iconv, with only those tables that are
-: actually required loaded into memory. If none are found (as would be
-: the case on systems without libiconv installed), this would mean no
-: charset translation was possible, but that is a small drawback
-: compared to wasting several megabytes of disk space.
Thanks, Tim. That's exactly the kind of arrangement I would
have expected, and I agree completely with your assessment.
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