From: William Goodspeed <goodspeed@posteo.net>
Subject: Re: [REPOST] ksh: utf8 full width character support for emacs.c
To: tech@openbsd.org
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2025 14:30:30 +0000

On Tue, 2025-04-08 at 08:39 +0200, Christian Schulte wrote:


> Sorry. I cannot help you with this any further. Nothing mandates multi
> byte strings to actually contain UTF-8. Hard coding UTF-8 handling in
> ksh seems wrong to me. The C standard is pretty clear about this. I feel
> very sorry no one competent is replying to you helping you to solve the
> issue at hand.

IMO, the code currently in ksh is in a pretty unfortunate shape. It's true
that "Nothing mandates multi byte strings to actually contain UTF-8", instead
OpenBSD chose to only consider UTF-8, and there are hard coded UTF-8 handling
all over the code base already. The patch just keeps that coding style without
introducing extra problems in spite of the current hard coded handling.

I don't think there is anyway out if utf8 hard coded handling (it's not
confirming to the C standard) and utf8 only support (it's OpenBSD's decision
and exists in other softwares in obsd) were both disagreed.

Yours,
Goodspeed