[wikka-community] International support and UTF8 support

[mahefa randimbisoa]

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Krzysztof Trybowski
<trybowski at aeropolis.pl> wrote:
> Hello all,
> Is there a roadmap regarding UTF8 support?
>
> I've read the articles from WikkaWiki site, regarding this topic, but
> they all seem to be pretty far from describing anything coming soon.
> They are outdated too.
>
> I'd like to push this things a little further.
>
> The article HandlingUTF8 describes things that are not clear to me. Do
> we really need to do such conversions? We CAN serve pages in utf8 and
> save utf8 in database. The only issue I can image would be if PHP
> functions had problems with such multibyte data. Could anyone put some
> light on this issue in context of modern PHP and MySQL versions?
>
> As for old software versions (PHP <=4.x, MySQL <=4.0) I think we could
> drop support for them if that would solve problems. PHP 4 is very old
> and so is MySQL 4.0.
>
> My opinion is that WikkaWiki should use utf8 as widely as possible.
> The only situation when this could be problematic is with upgrading
> from already existing installations which can use any charset. I
> believe there should be a special upgrading-application that would
> convert the data.
>
> Right now I use WikkaWiki trunk with some modifications to support utf
> (headers, mysql collation) and it seems to be working just fine! If
> there are any known issues, could you point them? So that some further
> testing could be done.
>
> Those modifications that I use are very simple ones and are described
> here http://wikkawiki.org/UTF8DatabaseCollation and here
> http://wikkawiki.org/WikkaLocalization#hn_Using_different_charsets
>
> So, what actually stops us from progressing in this area?
>
> Regards, KT
>
>
> --
> Krzysztof Trybowski

I may be completely wrong on my answer, so I'm talking only for myself.

I think it's a milestone problem. It has been since a long long time
that we thought about releasing 1.1.7,
and UTF8 should be supported after this release. Due to the number of
intermediate releases we had to focus on,
we could not run as fast as we wished with 1.1.7, and there is still a
number of tickets open for this milestone.

The ticket 431 which address this need :
http://tracker.wikkawiki.org/ticket/431 is scheduled for 1.2, that may
be the reason why we didn't consider this as a priority. The other
reason may be that we didn't heard from users any problems using
iso8859-1, and those who play with utf8 don't report it works good.

OTOH, I think there's not another big issue with its adoption, and
since you are now confirming that the patchs mentionned above work
well, I think the milestone of the ticket 431 needs to be changed to
1.1.7, or at worst 1.1.7.1

--
Mahefa