[Mono-dev] mcs default encoding: Latin1 or not

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> Thus I think the decision is, whether we are for culture
> neutralism, or for convenience of Latin1 people. There is no
> reason I stand for the latter, at least based on the factors
> I listed above.

I would like to move to utf-8 myself, but we do need a plan to deploy
this, and with all the other changes, my personal preference is to way
after 1.1.9 is released to make the change.

This change is a change that will affect a lot of our contributors, so
we must understand if their tools will properly support utf-8.

I envision a set of stages:

	* Reviewing the tools: do Emacs, vi and MonoDevelop cope with
	  utf-8 files that have a 3-byte marker at the beginning and
	  do they save them back?

	  I do not want to end up in a situation where we get a mix of
	  Latin1 + utf-8 files.

	* Translating latin1 to utf-8 all the .cs source files on the
	  mcs directory.  Set -codepage:utf-8 on the command line.

	* Actually making the mcs default change.

Another possibility is not changing the mcs source files, and instead
force mcs to use the latin-1 code page while building the class
libraries and changing mcs to use Encoding.Default.

Miguel.