Re: Import widechar support from FreeBSD

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2004 at 10:15:20PM -0000, Andreas Hauser wrote:
> Hoi,
> 
> these patches add widechar support from FreeBSD and
> also remove deprecated stuff that is to be removed in FreeBSD 6.
> Most rune stuff and utf2 is killed.
> The only thing that is missing is contrib/gdtoa,
> which provides wcstof and wcstold.

After looking at both FreeBSD's and NetBSD's multibyte support, I want
to express that I don't like the static inclusion at all. NetBSD's
citrus derived source does a dlopen of the modules, which isn't
_currently_ supported for static binaries. But adding a hack for that
is easier than to include all supported character sets into any static
binary using wide character support. Besides, once we have a minimal
dlopen implementation for static binaries, it will work much better.

I'm currently working on getting the Citrus code ready for inclusion.
One important problem is that because of how FreeBSD 4 historically
handled e.g. ctype macros, I will have to create some compatibility
functions to keep the ABI intact. I don't want to bump libc's major
at this time.

Joerg