[Lazarus] Testing Unicode and Windows system codepage in Lazarus 1.6

Jürgen Hestermann juergen.hestermann at gmx.de
Sun Jan 17 13:54:20 CET 2016


Am 2016-01-17 um 12:34 schrieb Juha Manninen:
 > LCL continues to work as before when you define "DisableUTF8RTL". Then
 > AnsiString is coded with the system codepage by default. The UTF-8
 > conversion functions still work.

You may have a false impression of how Free Pascal/Lazarus is used by most people.
At least I did not wait until the current version to use Unicode (and long paths)
for file names and others. I think many did so.
Therefore we have build our own infrastructure/functions to work with the
Windows unicode API functions. In this case using "DisableUTF8RTL" would
be no option as it bombs us back to ANSI/short paths and still requires to do code changes.
That's not good.

So we need to live with the changes and understand the logic behind it (which IMO
is much more complicated than before). The amount of time we have to invest
is unforseeable for us and therefore many get frustrated (especially, because
the documentation is poor).

I have done the changes to (some) of my programs now and it works quite okay
but it was a hard time until this was finished (and I still don't know whether
bugs lurk here and there).


 > I don't know why you always find excuses to complain. It is not nice.
 > Please stop it.

Please stop ignoring and gibing those who have problems with the new unicode types.
I know how they feel and such statements are not helpful.
If you don't want to help then ignore these mails.
I know that those who have already worked on this for a long time
cannot understand why not everybody instantly knows how the new
codepage aware ansistrings work but be assured that for many this is
completely new. So bare with our frustration and better ignore such
mails than revile the writers.





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