[Development] RFC: Defaulting to or enforcing UTF-8 locales on Unix systems

[Eike Ziller]

> On 18. Nov 2019, at 00:12, Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development <development at qt-project.org> wrote:
> 
> Il 17/11/19 01:55, Thiago Macieira ha scritto:
>> Hi
>> Sorry, it looks like this thread is not progressing in a calm and reasoned
>> manner, the way it was meant to be. And I'm very much to blame. So I apologise
>> for the strong language and passionate opinions. I'm deleting most of what I
>> had written as a reply so we can start over.
>> Let's start with your questions:
>> On Saturday, 16 November 2019 10:50:13 PST André Pönitz wrote:
>>> You have not yet answered
>>> 
>>>   - why this decision was made
>> You know, I don't know. To be frank, I don't know that a decision *was* made.
>> It all started with a change (see OP) about removing QTextCodec from the API
>> and from QtCore. It seemed reasonable enough but it turned up quite a few
>> kinks that hadn't been predicted. One of them, which may still be a
>> showstopper, is QXmlStreamReader's inability to handle XML data encoded in
>> anything except UTF-8, though a thorough search of all XML files in my system
>> turned up exactly zero such files.
>> I don't know why QTextCodec is being removed. I don't remember any decisions
>> in prior QtCS or this mailing list about removing it. We definitely discussed
>> removing the CJK codecs and their big tables and that can still be done, with
>> no effect in the API, since QTextCodec is backed by ICU's ucnv. We may have
>> discussed removing it, but I don't remember a firm decision. And even if it is
>> firm, after looking at the consequences of doing so, we may want to reverse
>> our decision.
> 
> I don't know either. Is it to make QtCore smaller? Wasn't the feature system ("Qt Lite") supposed to address that? Or is it to make it less of a "kitchen sink", and split it in smaller libraries? Could that mean having QTextCodec in its own library, and QXmlStreamReader in another (that depends on the former)?

In QtCore it seems to be used by the MIME database support, and in a serialization backend.
So, one would need to think about what to do with these at least.
Then, looking at qtbase, it’s also used for DBUS and in androiddeployqt / -testrunner (for e.g. the manifest file), and RCC of course.

>> Why does Qt Creator need other codecs?

Qt Creator is a generic text editor. A generic text editor is expected to be able to read and write files in different encodings.

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Eike Ziller
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