Re: [Gptfdisk-general] gdisk UTF16 check

[KESHAV P.R. <sko...@gm...>]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 02:49, Rod Smith <rod...@ro...> wrote:
> On 03/18/2011 02:24 PM, KESHAV P.R. wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 23:56, Rod Smith<rod...@ro...>  wrote:
>>>
>>> I've just posted a new version to the git repositories
>>> on SourceForge. This version (0.7.1-pre2) adds proper UTF-16LE support
>>> for
>>> the partition name fields.
>>
>> I tested my gpt disk by changing name of 1 partition with 'செய்திகள்'
>> (without quotes) (tamil word for News). It looks weird in my terminal
>> though (locale en_US.UTF-8 with us keymap). Tamil uses dravidian
>> script.
>
> I tried the cut-and-paste method using the word from your e-mail and got
> similar results; however, long story short, I found that if I changed my
> terminal's font from Monospace to almost anything else, the word suddenly
> displayed correctly. Thus, I think it's a font issue with Monospace, or
> perhaps some issue in the terminal program (I'm using Xfce's) that's
> preventing it from working until the font is changed.
>

Changing fonts does not solve the issue of viewing the text prfoperly
in terminal. But copying the text from terminal to firefox showed the
proper text so i guess internally gdisk stores the text properly. So I
also think its a font/locale issue.

> Results were similar with two of the GPT backup files you provided, but I
> had problems with the Rupee symbol. Maybe that's a locale issue...?
>
>> Sorry I couldn't test it in non-US locales or keyboard as I have never
>> used any other language apart from english in computers itself.
>
> I may just have to release it without much more testing.
>
>> I don't know how many of the european languages use non-roman
>> letters but i can assure you plenty of asian languages have their own
>> scripts.
>
> Many of them have at least a few characters with umlauts or the like. Greek,
> of course, has its own alphabet. I've been using Cyrillic for testing, since
> I took a semester of Russian in college and so can at least understand the
> characters.
>
>> I think it is best for you to try it yourself as i did the same thing
>> you did - copy-paste from websites. Anyway i will test new versions as
>> an when you update git (i personally do not follow your release
>> versions in this regard). For archlinux, use this package
>> http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=39338 .
>
> I appreciate your (and others') efforts to distribute GPT fdisk in official
> distributions' package systems, but I'd appreciate it if you NOT distribute
> the git version in this way. I occasionally upload code to git that's not
> been well tested, or even that has known bugs, just so that others can take
> a look at it (as for example with the Unicode support). When I make a full
> regular release, I'm more careful about squashing all the known bugs,
> updating the version string, removing debugging output, etc. In other words,
> the git version should be considered an "alpha test" for the next final
> release. (FWIW, the current git version has two known bugs in the Unicode
> support: You can't create an empty partition name or a partition name with
> more than one consecutive space in it. These are minor bugs, and I may be
> forced to leave one or both bugs in place, although I have ideas about how
> to work around them both.) If you must distribute the git version, please at
> least clearly label it with a word like "alpha", "testing", or "prerelease,"
> and make the regular version available, too. Thanks.

Archlinux has 2 kinds of repos, one being the official repos
containing binary packages and another being AUR containing user
submitted BUILD SCRIPTS alone (in this case PKGBUILD - similar to rpm
spec file). Since AUR consists of user submitted content, it is
considered 'unsupported' and it is the user's job to compile the
package using the provided build script. All info about AUR at
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR .

In this case the stable gdisk is maintained by archlinux devs in the
official repos while the gptfdisk-git package in AUR is maintained by
me (a user). The naming of the AUR package tells the user that it
compiles from git checkout and not from release tarballs. Some of the
notable VCS packages in AUR are util-linux-git
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=45540 ,
grub2-bios-bzr http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=41055 ,
kernel26-git http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=25304 (Linux
Kernel package compiled directly from git checkout - how stable is
that?). Anyway I created that package to help users using
bleeding-edge packages in their system. Thanks for your help and gdisk
documentation.

Regards.

Keshav

PS: Please reply to gpt...@li... .