Re: Win32 unicode vs ICU

On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 12:17:47PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:

> I think that ICU would be interesting as the base for a much larger
> patch that gets us away from depending on libc's locale support at all
> (in particular, getting rid of the "one locale per database" problem).
> But it seems like a heck of a big dependency to incur for any lesser goal.

There is a locale project from the Gnome guys, with an eye towards a
wider audience. The announcement, which states the goals of the
project, is here:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/locale-list/2005-August/msg00000.html

The project website is at http://live.gnome.org/LocaleProject

The big problem with this is that the license is likely to be LGPL, so
there's probably not much code we could use. OTOH, it's possible that
we could borrow some ideas from them. In particular, they are based
mostly on the Common Locale Data Repository,
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/

However, this thread on their list, which is about the license they will
choose, hints that rewriting the whole CLDR handling from scratch would
be very painful:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/locale-list/2005-August/msg00004.html

This is precisely the reason they are using LGPL: they do not want to
have to rewrite it all, which they would were they to choose a license
like BSD. (Personally I think this is folly -- someone else will have
to rewrite it again with a BSD license sometime, and then the value of
their work would be decreased.)

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]alvh.no-ip.org>)
"A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is he early.
He arrives precisely when he means to." (Gandalf, en LoTR FoTR)