[xmonad] Issue 154 in xmonad: add support for UTF-8 locale in NamedWindows and DynamicLog

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Issue 154: add support for UTF-8 locale in NamedWindows and DynamicLog
http://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=154

New issue report by andrea.rossato:
This is a pre-bug report: did you ever happen to see "Minority
Report"?

After reading David's report about resource leaks I felt the urgency
to pull the latest changes and give them a try. But everything seems
fine here.

I was a bit scared by that "Add bottom-tabbed layout", though - Roman,
did you notice that it duplicates what can be done by applying Brent's
Reflector to Tabbed? Very responsive reactions can lead to not so
excellent results...;)

Then I heard that Roman, aka Feuerbach, is willing to import Xmb*
functions in X11 and use them to add locale support to xmonad, by
calling setLocale in the core. And that Donald, who seems to be the
acting project leader, would be willing to support such an approach.

Which means none noticed that in X11 there are Xwc* functions for
locale support, and that xmonad has been already supporting XFT, which
is locale aware, for quite some months now. Spencer, together with
someone whose name I do not recall now, wrote it, even though some bugs
were left behind.

While fixing those bugs - byorgey pushed the related patches quite a few
days ago in order to fix issue #146 and issue #150 - I
also added full support for UTF-8 locales, and setLocale is already
called when the font system is initialized.

While Toumo would reject UTF-8 (only full locale support is acceptable
to preserve cultural diversity - and Toumo has probably a point here),
still I think it is quite a good second best. Adding full locale
support means using the only library that, as far as I know, supports
translating from at least a few encodings: iconv.

BTW, if you want full locale support I may be sending a patch with a
few iconv calls - but you can do it yourself by searching the ML
archives.

The attached patches are just an attempt to avoid what I came to think is
a quite probable possibility: Roman and Donald adding a new and
different locale support to xmonad without even noticing the old one -
which could lead to unexpected even if interesting effects.

The attached patches make it visible the fact that xmonad already
support UTF-8 locale when the contrib library is compiled with the
"with_utf8" or "use_xft" flags. The prompt don't need them, and the Shell
prompt is already UTF-8 aware - if the contrib library is compiled with
that support.

The fist patch will make getName use the XTextProperty structure to
retrieve the window's name. This was contributed in issue #44, but I
removed a few bad bugs. This way you'll see non ASCII characters in
window's decorations.

The second one will encode in UTF-8 the DynamicLog output - so that
non ASCII characters in window's names can be correctly logged too -, if,
and only if, the contrib library has compiled with those configuration
options - you can use this feature with darcs xmobar.

In other words, with these patches xmonad is going to fully support UTF-8
locales. Or, even better, the full support for UTF-8 locales will be
visible even by xmonad developers.

;)

Attachments:
	utf8_NamedDynLog.dpatch  46.6 KB


Issue attributes:
	Status: New
	Owner: ----
	Labels: Type-Patch Priority-Medium Usability

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