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

[Atsushi Eno]

Hello,

> 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.

Agreed.

> 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 revisit here when my linux installation got recovered (messed
on moving to opensuse).

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

We already have them mixed, btw.

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

Actually when it comes to that we can't handle UTF-8 without BOM,
then the only remaining way is to just use ASCII if we don't want
to mess svn to add BOM on every sources in this way. (That's why
I stick to ASCII).

> 	* 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.

I personally tend to take this way for those library that already
contains not a small number of Latin1 source files.

Atsushi Eno