encoding APIs (was Re: directory structure ...)

From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Apr 25 2002 - 12:58:35 EDT

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    At 05:42 PM 4/25/02 +0100, F J Franklin wrote:
    >I think I understood it. XAP always seems like GUI-related stuff.

    Agreed. I admit that I'm not familiar enough with the encoding manager to
    know which side of that line it "really" belongs on.

    >What got
    >me thinking about the encoding manager was working on the UTF8String class
    >where all I wanted to do was convert between UTF-8 & UCS-2, and felt very
    >frustrated about the apparent need to use XAP routines - in the end I
    >dodged the issue, but if Abi is going to be converting between UTF-* &
    >UCS-* internally then perhaps the encoding manager ought to be integrated
    >with the string class. It's not clear to me why the encoding manager is in
    >XAP anyway, though I'm sure there is (or was) a good reason. At the moment
    >iconv stuff is scattered, in UT_iconv, UT_[w]ctomb (ick) & XAP_Enc... and
    >isn't always treated very consistently, so perhaps a rewrite is in order
    >anyway.

    Ick. As you suggest, some judicious refactoring might be in order here.
    Again, without looking at the code, I'd assume that there could be as many
    as three API layers here:

      1. low-level wrappers to manage iconv weirdness
      2. mid-level management of encodings
      3. GUI wrappers for #2 (if needed)

    Clearly #1 is UT and #3 is XAP. If #2 can be cleanly broken out, then it's
    more likely to belong with #1 in UT.

    Paul,
    interface cop

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