Re: putty can shape now..

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Mohammed Elzubeir wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 03:13, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > CP-1256 should not be used in any stage in any software anymore.
> > A single-byte encoding for Unicode is already available.  It's
> > called UTF-8.
>
> I disagree.

While generally you may be right, in this case I still stand on
my point.  Absolutely NO applciation should convert Unicode
stream to CP-1256 in it's processing queue.  Wanna know what
happens if it does?  Would be like early versions of MSSql and
other stuff that would pi** on Unicode Arabic characters that are
not in CP-1256.

> Well, if we lived in an idealistic world, perhaps.

We are moving toward that idealistic world.  if you keep
supporting people they won't change.  You have not have an Arabic
PuTTY, so one with only Unicode support would not break anything
working now.  Just that people/companies would have yet another
reason to move to Unicode.

>  However,
> and especially when it comes to PuTTY, I think it is rather important to
> have CP-1256 support at some point.

I'm not sure in which layer are you talking about.  Almost all
Windows machines support Unicode these days.  And on server side
you can always run "luit" to convert any character set to Unicode
in terminal level.  That's the prefered way these days instead of
every terminal emulator supporting zillions of legacy character
sets.

> I think I have gone over this with Musab on IRC some time back. We have
> a Samba server in our offices. Workstations are running different
> versions of MS-Windows. Most people happen to enjoy naming their files
> and folders in Arabic. Windows will save those in CP-1256. Now, in order
> for me to administer the box, I ssh to it. Say, I am on a Windows box
> and using PuTTY. If PuTTY is not to support such an encoding, what do I
> do?

Huh?  I can't get your point.  When mounting Samba or any other
partition you can set the filename encoding, so no problem there.
And PuTTY can show Unicode on any Windows box even if the box
saves it's file names in CP-1256.  So I'm totally confused.

> As you can see, reality often dictates what solutions we opt for ;)

Reality is an illusion caused by hacker deficiency.

> --
> Regards,
> Mohammed Elzubeir

behdad