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Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 17:50:58 -0500
From: JT Williams <jeffw AT darwin DOT sfbr DOT org>
To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Cc: tim DOT van DOT holder AT pandora DOT be
Subject: Re: gettext port
Message-ID: <20010731175058.A1259@kendall.sfbr.org>
Mail-Followup-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com, tim DOT van DOT holder AT pandora DOT be
References: <7458-Tue31Jul2001211847+0300-eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> <CAEGKOHJKAAFPKOCLHDIEEBHCGAA DOT tim DOT van DOT holder AT pandora DOT be>
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In-Reply-To: <CAEGKOHJKAAFPKOCLHDIEEBHCGAA.tim.van.holder@pandora.be>; from tim.van.holder@pandora.be on Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 09:51:01PM +0200
Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
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-: > 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.