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List:       bricolage-general
Subject:    Re: [Bricolage-General] State of the Unicode (was: character encoding in Bricolage UI)
From:       David Wheeler <david () kineticode ! com>
Date:       2004-01-28 19:47:09
Message-ID: C28AAB5E-51CA-11D8-BE21-000A95972D84 () kineticode ! com
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On Jan 28, 2004, at 9:29 AM, Andrea Rota wrote:

> I upgraded my Perl package to that in Debian unstable (5.8.2) and,
> guess, it works now.

Great!

> Before preparing the patch for Bric::FAQ, I would like to summarize 
> "the
> state of the unicode", just in case I'm missing something.
> Anyone better at dealing with this encoding stuff please correct me!
>
> Contrary to what Bric::Admin says, Perl 5.8.0 or later seems to be
> required if using a character set other than plain ASCII, not a
> character set other than UTF-8.
> Actually, it seems to me that Perl < 5.8.0 is okay, whatever be the
> encoding, unless non-ascii characters are entered in the UI.
> So it might make sense to just strongly suggest to install Perl 5.8.0 
> or
> later, unless one is sure that no non-ascii characters will ever be
> entered by users.

Yes, that makes sense. BTW, I've added code to 1.7.x (soon to be 1.8.0) 
that issues a warning during installation of the Perl version is < 
5.8.0. But maybe we should just require 5.8.0...

> Other than this, I see no other spots to correct.

Great!

> Final working configuration (for me) is:
>
> - Bricolage 1.6.8, with CHAR_SET=UTF-8 in bricolage.conf
> - Perl 5.8.2
> - Postgresql 7.2.1 (any version >= 7.1.0 should work, AFAIK), with
> Bricolage database encoded in UNICODE. Actually, I now tend to create
> the Postgresql database cluster with UNICODE as default encoding 
> (initdb
> --encoding UNICODE -D /usr/local/pgsql/data)

Good idea.

> After having read Postgresql docs at
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/multibyte.html, I'm 
> almost
> sure that one can indeed use whatever encoding is most practical in the
> DB, because "All character sets can be used transparently throughout 
> the
> server" - as the docs say. Any DB admin on the list could confirm or
> correct this?

It's true, but Bricolage isn't written this way. It assumes that the 
back end will always store Unicode.

> I look forward to hearing comments on this encoding issue before 
> sending
> the diff for Bric::Admin and Bric::FAQ to the list. It would be worhty
> knowing if somebody's using Perl 5.6.x successfully with non-ascii
> characters, just to make happy the folks who cannot upgrade Perl on
> their servers for whatever reason.

I've heard that others have had Unicode problems go away after 
upgrading from 5.6.x to 5.8.x. But I don't know if anyone has tried it 
with the recently released 5.6.2.

Regards,

David



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