[MPlayer-dev-eng] locale in GUI

[Hans-Dieter Kosch]

Reimar Döffinger wrote:
[...]
>>> I don't know how easy it would be, but it would be possible to avoid
>>> this issue for our GUI by never using the _from_utf8 function but
>>> instead storing the original string alongside the utf8 encoded one.
>> This is basically what we are doing with the _utf8 functions.
>>
>> GLib assumes that all filenames (and all other strings) are UTF-8
>> encoded. So
>> any file system GLib function passes the names UTF-8 in <-> UFT-8 out.
>>
>> For those of us having non-UTF-8 filenames, there is
>> G_FILENAME_ENCODING. If
>> it is set, GLib can convert appropriately - which is done by
>> g_filename_from_utf8() and g_filename_to_utf8() (functions that
>> probably just
>> return their input on UTF-8 systems).
>>
>> You might know that I'm running an old ISO-8859-1 system. I've set
>> G_FILENAME_ENCODING=ISO-8859-1 and everything's running just fine.
>> Inside
>> GLib/GTK my filenames are UTF-8, outside they're ISO-8859-1.
>>
>> Hans-Dieter's problem is his using @locale for G_FILENAME_ENCODING (or
>> G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1, meaning the same). So he's telling that his
>> filenames
>> aren't UTF-8 encoded, but rather in locale encoding. However, we avoid
>> setting a reasonable locale for reasons known.
>>
>> In short: If you have UTF-8 encoding, don't set the GLib environment
>> variables - everything will work just fine. Without UTF-8 encoding,
>> explicitly tell GLib by G_FILENAME_ENCODING which encoding you are
>> using.
>> Don't use @locale or G_BROKEN_FILENAMES.
> 
> The point of my suggestion is to make it work without such arbitrary rules.
> The from_utf8 function cannot work on a system that mixes utf8 and Latin1 file names, while the to_utf8 can work just fine. Thus avoiding the former (which for us should not be a big problem) makes the code more robust.
> 
Maybe I have a basic idea for a patch; need to think a few days...