[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#1824) Re: Re: (PR#2743) Blank messages and bad packet strings

["Reinier Post via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 07:55:57PM -0800, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa via RT 
wrote:

> Why don't we just having a Unicode locale a requirement to run Freeciv?
> 
> We'll lose a bit of portability but at least Windows and recent Linux
> versions have it. :-)

After the fact that its is a very playable game
portability is Freeciv's biggest asset.
 
> Porting the Xaw, GTK+ 1.2 and Windows clients will be a challenge.
> Amiga is probably hopeless.

It was a big event on the Freeciv servers when the Amiga native
client was released.  You don't want to trade those users for
such an unnecessary implementatio ntradeoff.

> That way you may even have city names in Japanese if you want to.

City names can be in Japanese (or any other language) if they can be
translated back to the C locale on the fly.  It would be like a gettext
translation except that the key is generated from the value after the
value os picked by the user.  This would require automatic character
transcription algorithms for all supported locales and it might produce
some funny names in some occasions especially when the normal English
name exists and is very different.  If all clients use the
same locale the "backtranscribed" name would remain invisible.

-- 
Reinier