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

[André Pönitz]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 07:09:30PM +0100, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On Monday, 18 November 2019 17:05:29 CET Lars Knoll wrote:
> > > On 18 Nov 2019, at 17:00, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > > 
> > >> The codecs we want to remove are just big tables of mapping old, legacy
> > >> codecs to UTF-16. We can easily remove those.
> > >> 
> > >> After that, removal of QTextCodec itself is not a big gain.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > So let me ask once again: Is ICU not already a hard requirement for Qt on
> > > 
> > > *nix systems? So why can we not just rely on ICU's tables?
> > 
> > 
> > No, it’s not a hard requirement. And especially for low end embedded
> > systems, we also want to keep it that way.
> 
> But we should not keep the our codecs (aside from the UTF ones) because of 
> that.

Why not?

I see no reason why we can't keep the QTextCodec _interface_ in Qt Core,
together with some interface to register new codecs, provide UTF-* directly,
and let the "fancy" ones live on in a seperate module, plugging them in
at runtime.

Andre'