[Libexif-devel] Character sets in libexif, exif, GTK and other applications

[Hans U. N. <gp...@n-...>]

Hi,

in CVS, libexif calls

   bind_textdomain_codeset(GETTEXT_DOMAIN, "UTF-8")

every time before it calls

   bindtextdomain (GETTEXT_PACKAGE, LOCALEDIR);

This will make libexif return all strings in UTF-8 regardless of the
current locale.

This, in turn, will break all libexif message output on non-UTF-8
output media, such as iso-8859-1 terminals running exif, which is not
good.

As the default output character set is the one the locale specifies,
if we don't call bind_textdomain_codeset() in libexif at all, exif
will always produce proper output for the respective locale.

However, I think I remember that GTK (and pango or whatever the one of
100 GTK sub libraries in question is called) requires all strings it
is to print to be UTF-8.

This would mean that we should add an additional function to libexif
which allows such libexif users (libexif-gtk, gexif, or any other
software which requires UTF-8) to explicitly request UTF-8.

Is this correct?

Uli