I’m in the process of implementing the --enable-path-encoding=X configuration option to allow the selection of a character encoding for filesystem paths. It will be possible to chose between native, latin1, utf8, ucs2, ucs4 and wchar. The current default is “native” and this will be changed to “utf8” which seems to be becoming the standard for filesystems.
Does anyone see a problem with this?
Note that the default character encoding for text files is ISO-8859-1 (latin1). Through the -:fX runtime option it is possible to select a default encoding different from the builtin default with the following choices: ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UCS-2, UCS-4, UTF-16, UTF-8 and UTF.
I’m considering adding a configuration option to change the builtin default character encoding for text files. What should the default default be? It is probably safest to keep ISO-8859-1 because it has a one to one mapping of bytes to characters. Comments?
Marc