Adding Malaysian, Indonesian,Vietnamese UTF-8 locales [PSARC/2008/420FastTrack timeout 07/11/2008]

[Yong Sun]

Hi, Roland,

Thank you very much for the comments, and please see my reply in-line,

Roland Mainz wrote:
> Yong Sun wrote:
>   
>> This project is targeting to Indiana 2008.11 release, UTF-8 locales have
>> higher priority than legacy locales,
>>     
>
> Right (except stuff like "zh_CN.GB18030" which still should be preferred
> over the UTF-8 variant since the matching goverment requires it (and is
> very picky about it)) ...
>
>   
>> we will gather more
>> information/feedback to see if we have future plans for legacy locales.
>>     
>
> Ok... my main concern is "interoperabilty", e.g. what happens if I am
> running something like the "ms_MY.UTF-8" or "vi_VN.UTF-8" locale and
> then do a slogin into a Linux machine ?
>   
I may not understand your question well, if you meant with same UTF-8 
locale, there should be no problem; if target env is in legacy locale, 
we could set charset (Menu->Terminal->Set Character Encoding) in 
gnome-terminal. For xterm or dtterm, we have to manually use iconv(1) to 
convert the output to UTF-8 encoding. Actually, it's always a question, 
if local/remote locales are different.

BTW, more and more linux distributions only ship UTF-8 locales, user 
needs extra steps to generate or install legacy locales.
>   
>> Regarding to the localization of CLI messages, yes, it would be changed
>> over time, hopefully by the opensolaris l10n communities.
>>
>> And for you last question, X11 terminal emulators, I believe the answer
>> is Yes, since they are all unicode characters, and we will ship the
>> proper fonts.
>>     
>
> Please check whether you have _fixed_width_ fonts with all matching
> point populated. Many fonts for these languages are either proportional
> or don't have all points populated.
>   
Malaysian, Indonesian use Latin characters, no special fonts required. 
For Vietnamese, from 
http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/main.html#UNICODE-COMPLIANT%20FONTS, 
we could see many unicode fonts have cover Vietnamese charset. William, 
please double check the available fonts.
> BTW: What about keyboard mappings and input methods (e.g. VIQR, VNI,
> TELEX etc, for Vienamese), e.g. how does an user type characters for
> these languages, either within Gnome or without having Gnome installed
> (e.g. there is stuff like http://xvnkb.sourceforge.net/ for plain X11
> applications) ?
>   
We already have VIQR input method in IIIMF, and you could add it via 
iiim-properties(1). IIIMF could serve gtk application, or plain X11 
application via XIM interface. For Telex and VNI input methods, they are 
supported in scim-m17n (www.scim-im.org, www.m17n.org), we are going to 
integrate SCIM to Solaris/OpenSolaris recently, and planed to integrate 
m17n and scim-m17n a little later.
> ----
>
> Bye,
> Roland
>
>