From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-09-22T22:03:12+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:18792] Re: Character encodings - a less radical suggestion

On Sep 21, 2008, at 9:35 PM, Martin Duerst wrote:

> In terms of potential problems, I see the following:
> - A library sets Encoding::default_internal. That would lead
>  to serious problems, and should be clearly advised against
>  in the documentation. Libraries either have to be written
>  in a general way, or have to document that they only work
>  with certain values of Encoding::default_internal
>  (this proposal would therefore help you, but not e.g.
>   James Gray for the CVS library)

I really think we need to avoid any solution that means we will need  
to change all existing libraries, even just to declare their supported  
encodings.  Enough libraries are already broken on 1.9 without us  
adding to that and so many great libraries are no longer maintained at  
all.

The current situation is probably that we have to be very careful what  
we pass into these Unicode only libraries to get them to work.  That's  
far from ideal but, it's better than having the library fail to load  
at all due to some global setting I may not have even created  
(assuming I required code that made the change).

James Edward Gray II