FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Craig Berry [mailto:craigberry AT mac.com]
> Sent: June 24, 2003 3:35 PM
> 
> I think the moral of this story for the configuration mavens 
> is that the world is not as simple as the two categories 
> "defined(HAVE_ICONV)" and "! defined(HAVE_ICONV)".  It is 
> quite possible to have a perfectly good iconv() function with 
> a very limited set of data for it to operate on.  What seems 
> to be of interest to FreeTDS is whether the UCS-2LE, 
> ISO-8859-1, and UTF-8 conversions are all available.  If they 
> aren't, I don't think it matters whether iconv is present as 
> we'll have to use home-grown conversions in any case.

Just to be clear, we're not foisting any requirements on anyone.  :-)

FreeTDS in and of itself requires only ASCII and UCS-2LE.  It isn't supposed
to require *any* iconv -- it's not hard to convert between those two -- but
I recently broke the "iconv-less" configuration.  

I don't mean to *require* any iconv, nor demand any conversion from any
iconv other than what the client demands.  I only mean to handle whatever
charsets the client and server are using, and to ask the installed iconv to
carry out the conversion.  If the installed iconv meets the client's
requirements -- however simple or esoteric they might be -- that's good
enough for me.  

UTF-8 is an interesting, important, and proximate challenge, both because
RH9 defaults to UTF-8, and because it represents the technical trend.  To
support it requires breaking many implicit assumptions of a 1:1 byte/char
ratio.  I expect that once we can handle UTF-8, we'll be well on our way to
handling UCS-2 clients (especially OS X).  

As long as your iconv's charset names are present in
src/tds/alternative_character_sets.h, FreeTDS will be able to exercise your
iconv on your behalf.  That's the plan, at least.  

--jkl
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