Re: ICONV, UTF-8, and language fun on OpenVMS - 0.62

On Tuesday, October 28, 2003, at 02:37PM, Patrick Spinler 
<spinler.patrick@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I compiled 0.62 with a few minor changes (if someone can tell me the 
>preferred patch format and where to send it, I can try to send a patch).

GNU unified diffs via the patch submission section at 
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetds>.  Or simply send it to me off list 
and I'll integrate what you have into the VMS patch I have in progress.

>However, I immediately ran into the UTF-8 and ISO-8559-1 problems 
>discussed in this thread:
>
><http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/freetds/2003q2/012650.html>
>
>In summary, there's two problems.  First the solvable one: VMS uses 
>'ISO8559-1' instead of the 'ISO-8559-1' used in the FreeTDS source.  I 
>fixed this by, (as recommended by Craig Berry) putting
>
>    client charset = ISO8859-1
>
>in the [global] section of my FreeTDS.conf file, and by adding an alias 
>to the iconv_aliases structure in encoding.h for {"ISO8559-1", 0}.

I don't think this is necessary any more if you get the conversion table you 
need (see below).  The proper aliases will be detected at run-time.

>
>Now the hard one: tds_iconv_init wants to set up a translation from 
>UTF-8 (or an equivilent charset) to ISO-8859-1.  The default install of 
>VMS has no such translation available, only to ISO-8559-1 from UCS-2 and 
>UCS-4.
>
>Help !  Should I:
>
>*) Find an appropriate language kit supporting UTF-8 charsets and 
>translations for OpenVMS ?  Where would I even begin looking for such a 
>thing ?

Right where the documentation tells you it is (but yes, it's harder to find 
than it should be).  You need the internationalization kit in the directory 
[VMSI18N_ALPHA07x] on the layered product CD with a volume label of ALP07xLP 
where "x" is your minor VMS version number.  And before anyone asks, yes, it is 
quite silly to have a perfectly good iconv implementation but no UTF-8 
translations available without an additional installation.  

>*) Try to copy the ct_param() functionality from 0.62 to 0.61 ?

Ick.

>*) Something else ?

Wait a week or three.  I have 0.62-to-be working pretty well using the 
HP-supplied UTF-8 translator mentioned above with the HP-supplied iconv.  But I 
also have plans to have [.vms]configure.com detect whether the UTF-8 
translators are present and use the FreeTDS replacement iconv if not.