John Marino sent a helpful link to show the cross-platform work he’s been involved in: He brought the locale work from Illumos into DragonFly over the summer (look for his name on commits), and now it has been brought from DragonFly into FreeBSD, with Baptiste Daroussin reporting on the process. If there’s any OpenBSD/NetBSD developers reading, with an interest in locales, this may be useful..
(someone correct me if that’s not the right Illumos link)
So, long story short, eventually I will be able to type ä, å, ö, in the console after selecting my locale in Dragonfly?
Sure? I think there may be the hurdle of character support in whatever program you are using, but the facilities will be there if the program can take advantage of them.
Not OpenBSD. They recently dropped locale support in base for everything except C (ASCII) and UTF-8, preferring to leave support for other locales in applications to external facilities (e.g., iconv). The existing support for other locales was evidently unmaintained.
corey,
The changes include *COLLATION* and *CTYPE* definition. Every locale, including UTF-8 has six LC types.
OpenBSD can benefit from this work — it provides automatic generation of the LC_* files that make up the locales. FreeBSD had not updated theirs in a decade, so without generation the data gets static.
You’re only talking about encoding. (ISO-8859-*, etc)