Xorg and GB18030 support

[Ashish Kapadia]

        It seems like XOrg's Xlib is currently lacking support for GB18030.  I have raised this question on debian mailing list and I was advised to send an email to the Xorg mailing list.  Please see the email below for more information about the problem that we're experiencing with GB18030 locale.  If anyone have any comment or suggestion on this please let me know.

Thanks & Regards,

Ashish
Kinesix Software

-----Original Message-----
From: Julien Cristau [mailto:jcristau at debian.org]
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 2:14 PM
To: Ashish Kapadia
Subject: Re: Xorg and GB18030 support

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 14:46:48 -0400, Ashish Kapadia wrote:

> Hi Julien,
>
>         Thanks for a quick reply and suggesting to contact xorg directly.
>
>         As far as the reason I think Xorg is lacking GB18030 support is because we have an application that is built using Xlib and motif.  This application works fine on the Solaris machine under GB18030 locale, but it is not working on Ubuntu or Fedora (both of the distributions are using XOrg).  While trying to search why this was the case, I ran across the thread by James Su (http://osdir.com/ml/xfree86.internationalization/2002-03/msg00041.html) for XFree86 where he solved this problem with a patch in XLib.  I tried to find the patch in the XOrg source code but I did not locate the patch. I was expecting the patch to be there because this was developed back in 2002 and I think XOrg was forked from XFree86 much later.
>
>         Furthermore, the XOrg source code had static Character set mapping defined for GB2312 locale and other locales that seem to work fine with XLib but there is no specific code related to GB18030.  The applications developed with qt and gtk libraries seem to work with this locale because they have explicit support for the locale in their library.
>
OK, it indeed seems there's no specific handling of the gb18030 charset
in src/xlibi18n/lcUniConv/ in Xlib, which is where conversion for other
charsets seems to live.  Again, I think you should take that up with the
xorg folks if you want to get that changed.

Cheers,
Julien