FreeTDS Development Group

["Michael Kochetkov" <Michael.Kochetkov AT synartra.com>]

[...]

> > - it may work too). But for I do not know why reason such 
> > state of affairs
> > did not satisfied the guys who run the product architecture. 
> > They do want to
> > see 16-bit letters. And, frankly speaking, I would prefer it too.
> > 
> 
> FreeTDS do a very good translation. "They do want to see 16-bit
> letters"... do they have some technical reasons or just 
> sympathy ?? Some
Probably not. For example, the Russian language has the following encodings
(not the only but the most popular and really used):
1. OEM codepage - from MS DOS times, used by Windows console applications
now
2. Windows codepage (1251)
3. KOI8-R - the Linux standard
4. ISO_do_not_remember_number - Solaris,etc.

So, single byte encoding support looks as a somewhat cumbersome at first
sight.  16-bit unicode looks like an ideal fixed length solution for our
task that is directly supported by OS and compilers we use, SQL Server and
third party libraries. We do believe that 16-bit letters will not require
serious new knowledge or qualification from our developers (as, for example,
the ODBC on Unix requires from me now - I did with third party ODBC
libraries on Windows till now). 

> technical reasons why IMHO a modern unix system should use utf-8:
> - it's system default, filesystem are encoded on utf-8 api are utf-8
> compatible
> - it's default on XML and a supported html encoding in all 
> browser (very
> useful for PHP or script for html)
We planned to use the utf-16 for XML too.

Well, we have a Windows product already. And I understand the marketing
people desire to have an almost "free of charge" multilanguage support. They
just start thingking about whether it would be FreeTDS, an ODBC bridge with
or without multilaguage support or Unix project itself. That is why IMO our
reluctance to invest much time to non-fundamental for us things like ODBC or
XML (we used to buy third party libraies).

-
Mihael Kochetkov.