Re: GNUmail on NetBSD

[Wolfgang Lux]

Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 04/07/12 11:44, Wolfgang Lux wrote:
>> Fred Kiefer wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> For NSASCIIStringEncoding the code in GSFromUnicode() should never try
>>> to use iconv. We have the conversion for this format hard coded.
>>> Could you please add a breakpoint in this function and step through it? I 
>>> really would like to understand what goes on here.
>> The problem, as explained by the reference attached to Stefan's email, is 
>> that NetBSD's iconv does not support the //TRANSLIT option that GNUstep uses 
>> to implement lossy transformations (as you also can see from the backtrace 
>> provided by Riccardo). I have no idea how we could fix that in GNUstep, but 
>> on the other hand there is an easy solution for Riccardo: Just install the 
>> gnu libiconv package on NetBSD and make sure it gets used instead of the 
>> default one.
>> 
> I tried to install the gnu libiconv and reconfigure base and now it works 
> without warnings.
> Is this the only choice however?

Of course not :-)
You could implement lossy conversions in gnustep-base if the system's iconv 
library does not support the //TRANSLIT option. If you want to do that right 
(i.e., replace only those characters that cannot be represented in the target 
encoding) you probably have to re-implement a substantial part of (GNU) iconv. 
You could also go the lazy way and just replace every character which cannot be 
represented in ASCII regardless of the target encoding. I think neither of 
these solutions is satisfactory.
However, it might be worth adding a check to configure that tests whether the 
//TRANSLIT option is supported and suggests users to install GNU iconv if the 
option is not supported.

Wolfgang