[Freeciv-Dev] character sets on the chatline (was: (PR#2743) Blank messages and bad packet strings)

[Reinier Post <rp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I still think the best choice is to make everything sent and stored in
> ASCII except the player chat messages.
> gettext will take care of translating to the native language locally.

Yes.  The chat messages are a problem if players use different locales
for their clients.  Therefore players should always have the option to
chat in (C locale) ASCII, too.  A client can chat in its own particular
locale only if all other clients are known to be able to represent these
chat strings (which I suppose means that they must have support for its
character encoding turned on).  But I don't know if server messages and
private messages can be easily sent from every supported locale.

> ASCII is so widespread we can rely on it for being displayable. UTF-8 for
> player<->player messages is just icing on the cake. Why should we
> constrain users so that they cannot chat in their native language?

As long as they can also chat in a common language and with the server,
there is no problem with that.

-- 
Reinier