in reply to Japanese filenames and USING_WIDE in win32.h

The entire Win32 abstraction layer for perl is implemented in win32/Win32.c and win32/Win32io.c. Ideally you would put together a set of patches against those files that would allow a pragma to control the behaviour of widechars. For instance 

use widechar;

[download]

would do the trick. The problem you are going to face is that there are only about three or four active Perl develops who are on Win32, and they are unlikely to undertake this stuff without help from an interested party who can do things like test. So for instance if I saw you post a set of patches aimed at this objective, but not quite polished enough to be applied Id probably run with the ball and help you get them bedded down. The fact that USING_WIDE was removed probably indicates that whomever was most knowledgable about the feature felt it was dangerous to leave it in. Which IMO suggests that there is an alternate approach that would be fine.

From what I can see, the best way to get your clients what they want to is to get it done in perl itself. Which means interacting with the perl5porters list. Then when 5.10 comes out (this Christmas hopefully) they can use the nice new shiny stuff that you helped put in it. :-)

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Re^2: Japanese filenames and USING_WIDE in win32.h
by almut (Canon) on Nov 15, 2006 at 14:49 UTC

    Thank you very much for your encouragement, demerphq.

    I'll think about it. And if I should actually decide to go for writing a patch, I'll of course try to submit it -- though I'm not too optimistic about getting it accepted...

    I mean, realistically, why would any of you busy gurus want to spend time investigating a patch from a lil' girl without any credits in the perl community? In particular, as similar code has just recently been thrown out... and things overall don't exactly look like the whole world's been desperately waiting for this patch ;)

    Also, although I'm not entirely new to C coding, I've never seriously attempted hacking Perl's internals (closest I ever got was writing a few XS modules), and I have due respect for all the concepts and conventions that have evolved over time. At least it'll take me a while to catch up... Anyway, I'll still look into it.

    Well, I guess I should start lurking on p5p, to get a better feel for how things are being handled over there...

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      I mean, realistically, why would any of you busy gurus want to spend time investigating a patch from a lil' girl without any credits in the perl community?

      Because the patch does things that are of value to the community, and because we don't judge the merit of a patch based on your reputation in the perl community. Now if you go on perl5porters and write a bunch of replies to bug reports you dont understand then you will quickly end up in the community killfile, but if you step up with a patch that is sufficient for the perl core developers to polish up and bed down thats a totally different story.

      Seriously, if the community sees you trying to do the right thing but with some rough edges they will step up to help you. We dont care who you are, we care what you contribute and whether your ideas are sound.

      And frankly we need people like you. Just based on your original post it sounds like you have some worthy contributions to make.

      Lastly: there arent that many Win32 devlopers active on p5p, since you apparently are one I reckon youd find yourself a lot more welcome than you realize.

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        This all sounds very good -- makes me want to start with the patch right away ;)

        Seriously, if that's how things are being handled on p5p in everyday real life situations, I'm positively impressed.

        What I meant was: we're all human, and even for the most technically minded of us it's not always easy to keep those human factors entirely out of our interactions and judgements. More specifcally, I'd think it's all too natural to apply a positive bias to people of whom we already know their merits, and a somewhat more critical or don't-care attitude towards someone we don't know yet.

        (There isn't really anything wrong with that - it's just how the world is.  This kind of "pre-judging" even makes sense from an information processing point of view: our brain has less extra work to do, if we don't have to fully re-evaluate the world around us every time anew...)

        Well, before this gets entirely off-topic, I'll just stop here :)

        Lastly: there arent that many Win32 devlopers active on p5p, since you apparently are one I reckon youd find yourself a lot more welcome than you realize.

        Maybe I should mention I'm not really a Win32 developer. I only occasionally develop for Windows, i.e. when it's required for some project at work.  Actually, my friends would rather describe me as a girl with a strange love for commandlines, text interfaces, and such... in short, the traditional unix way. I'm not religous about it, though - just prefer it. And my programming experience is distributed accordingly.

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