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

[Edward Welbourne]

Thiago Macieira (31 October 2019 22:11) wrote [0]:
> This RFC (...) is meant to discuss how we'll deal with locales on Unix
> systems on Qt 6. This does not apply to Windows because on Windows we
> cannot reasonably be expected to use UTF-8 for the 8-bit encoding.

[0] https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2019-October/037791.html

The GNU make mailing list currently has a thread (starts at [1]) about
handling of encodings on Windows.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-make/2023-03/msg00066.html

The discussion there seems to indicate that setting the system code-page
to UTF-8 can be done in a way that interoperates gracefully with other
processes and the file system, presumably thanks to the system being
substantially UTF-16-based, so all 8-bit encodings go via that anyway.

The means to achieve this appear [2] to hinge on setting the active
codepage for the application in a manifest file, that it gets combined
with after it is linked.

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/globalizing/use-utf8-code-page

There do appear to be some vagaries still, it may depend on UCRT and I'm
not sure I've really understood it all, but it looks like we may, in
time, be able to consistently use UTF-8 as 8-bit encoding on Windows.

	Eddy.