cygwin's arabic support

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

I've been thinking about this for a while and now seems like the proper
time to bring this forth for discussion.  Cygwin [1] could very well be
a person's first introduction to a *nix (ie. unix/linux, etc) environment
and as such it should certainly support UTF-8 Arabic and support it well
(Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows).  Yet cygwin in its
current state (like PuTTY used to be) doesn't support Arabic __at all__.
One is unable to write/read his/her own name in Arabic within cygwin
which is a darn shame and should (nay, must) be fixed/changed.

I know we have a few people on the list that are windows savvy and as such
I'm wondering if there would be interest in starting a dialog with the
cygwin developers to see what we can do to help them bring proper Arabic
support forth (we are talking about the basics here - being able to read
and write in arabic).  Patches, as usual, against their code base will
show their developers that we are serious about seeing this support get
added so we should, IMHO, proceed down that path...

Mr. Ghoneim/khalifa/et al, how about it ?

[1] http://www.cygwin.com

Salam.

 - Nadim



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