Re: Please avoid using Xutf8* API.

[Stefan Monnier]

> Xutf8* APIs was suddenly introduced into XFree86 abruptly without
> concensus.  After the developper noticed the change, there had been
> tremendous discussions including flames to revoke these APIs.

OK!  I'll remove the change, then (it was somewhat experimental anyway).
Note that it's conditionalized on X_HAVE_UTF8_STRING.
Thanks for warning us about the problem.

> I couldn't find the discussions that corresponds to this change
> in emacs-devel ML, but from ChangeLog, this change seems to be
> introduced on 4/16.  Could you please teach us why do you need
> this change, Mr.Monnier?

The reason is basically as follows:
let's say your locale is fr_CH.iso-8859-1 and you use xmodmap
to bind some keycode to EuroSign.  Clearly XmbLookupString can't
return a string containing the euro char since it has
to return an iso-8859-1 string (where the euro char doesn't exist).
So we if XmbLookupString didn't return a string, we try again
with Xutf8LookupString which gives us the euro char (in utf-8).

Maybe an alternative would be to replace Xutf8LookupString with

        XmbLookupString(...)
        if (status_return == XLookupKeySym) {
          ;; Try again with unicode.
          <switch to utf-8 version of the same locale>
          XmbLookupString(...)
          <switch back to the original locale>
        }

but my X (and locale) programming knowledge is about as good as
inexistent so I have no idea how to do the switches.

Also we'd need to be sure that doing the locale-switches and the
additional call to XmbLookupString doesn't mess up any internal state.
This seemed to work with Xutf8LookupString, although we couldn't
find any doc that guarantees it.


        Stefan