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NATSPEC Library


NATSPEC library is intended to smooth national specificities in using of programs, to put it more exactly:



Pay attention, that the program is not capable of solving national and interethnic conflicts.


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The reasons for the appearance


A Linux user, who really works with this system, runs into charset problems quite often: with either files content, or filenames. Users, except for those speaking Western European languages, are very often enforced to specify the encoding for content or name of the files, they deal with. It occurs at 


Moreover, there are huge amount of programs, which usage yells for specifying the charset, but they give no option to do so:


These problems are often left without solution, or are solved by private capacity, or are fixed with patches not entirely correct.


It turns out, that the system is required to provide by some means the answers to following questions:


One may often hear the opinion, that those questions have no general answers and essentially can't have, and thus it is neither possible nor required to look for answers to them.
To a great extent, the problem is almost resolved (assuming we do not think about compatibility completely) by total system conversion ещ UTF-8 charset. Unfortunately even in this case, a number of problems would still arise (look UTF 8 Conversion Problems article)


But nobody had repealed the compatibility questions and anyway the interaction method with other operating systems (Windows, DOS, MAC) as well as with Unix-like operating systems must be settled and formulated. Especially it is important for the distribution building.


After (perhaps fluent) reviewing sources of projects like WINE, Linux kernel, gettext, Ly X?, GLIBC, GLIB, mount, submount, cdrtools, zip, dia, beep, xmms, the requirements had been formulated and library had been implamented, which provides answers for charsets questions, and also has a set of auxiliary functions, claimed by many projects.

What it is needed for 


There are variety of programs, which are tightly working with charsets, but by objective circumstances they go their own way in charsets support. Just only mention mkisofs built-in support for reencoding, which using the nls, extracted from nobody knows what Linux kernel version.


This project was created for solving most questions relate to text reencoding, outside of certain program. It enhances portability and allows certain project not to distract on writing yet another crutches for resolving general system problems.


The library is not a silver bullet or heal-all, it is just a feature to inmprove data interoperability between different systems and to ease users and programmers life during current intermediate phase, when all the progressive mankind had stepped one feet into brave new UTF-8 world (no, this abbreviation doesn't belong to UFO or coffins).

How does it work


LIBNATSPEC library defines such important concepts as 



and provides API for using them, as well as auxiliary functions, which allow:


The design principle: All the information, obtained from library, if possible should depend on current locale.

LIBNATSPEC only suggests default mounting charset. NOBODY REMOVES the possibility to specify a charset manually. Default value just becomes not iso-8859–1, but rather the one matching current locale.

Basis for heuristic is a table, constructed with the following algorithm: By list of installed with glibc locales, main charset information located in locale, and program also, which obtains information about charsets accordance of different OS from WINE, static array is formed from, which used in library further for charset definition by locale and etc.


The library is written with C language aiming at maximally possible portability. At this moment linking needs libc and libpopt libraries. The testing at other systems hasn't took place. It has been tested on different systems such as Free BSD?, Sun OS? perhaps Solaris?, Mac OS X and a number of popular GNU/Linux distro's.
There are interfaces for other languages:

* python

For using in scripts a console program is provided, which allows to query for parameters, detected by the library. For example:

$ natspec -l – would show the system locale
$ natspec -l – would show the charset used by filenames.
$ natspec -i – output all available information

(Please, try it out and tell us your opinion about accuracy of determining situation at your machine)


example is missed


For ALT Linux and other Red Hat? descendants:
There is a file /etc/sysconfig/i18n in system, in which, besides all, the system locale is set by LANG=locale string. For example, in my system, it is specified at this file: LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R

Where to download and how to acquaint


The library is available at

The library is available also at ALT Linux Sisyphus Sisyphus free package repository.


With any questions you may refer to address specified at the project README file. I will be glad to help with preparing this library for your distribution.

How to use


Please contact with e-mail: lav@etersoft.ru

Translator: Dmitry Kostrov


Страницы, ссылающиеся на данную: Локализация/БиблиотекаNATSPEC


 
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