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

> 
> Hi:
> 
> I'm trying to use FreeTDS (www.freetds.org) on OpenVMS, since 
> Sybase no 
> longer supplies a client and we need to upgrade to use our 
> institutional 
> sybase dbms server versions.  I was advised to stick with 
> FreeTDS 0.61 
> 'cause of various problems with 0.62.
> 
> Unfortunately, it turns out that we need some functions only 
> available 
> in 0.62, specifically, the ct_param calls used to set up sp_regwatch, 
> which is heavily used in our app.
> 
> 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).
> 
> 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>
>

Some solutions:
- use GNU-iconv
- disable iconv use (from some day old snapshot)
- do not use UTF8...

> 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}.
> 

Rejected, FreeTDS is able to detect. 

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

Arghhh!!!

> *) Something else ?
> 

freddy77