Re: [aspell-devel] VC6 and BCB5.5 patches

[Gary Setter]

<snip>
> > Fact is there are lots of ordinary people who
> > have to do projects based on decisions others make for them,
and
> > if it comes down that .NET support is required, there is
nothing
> > they can do.
>
> Yes, there is little point in working on a project that is
moving in the
> wrong direction. If everyone is using .NET, and you can't make
it work, then
> you are moving away from the majority and nobody is going to be
able to use
> what you have. However, if you choose your terms/commands
carefully, you
> could get things to work without having to resort to specific
special
> commands. For example, gcc has moved up to 3.x, yet Kevin is
trying to
> maintain 2.95 compatibility for as long as possible to keep it
compatible
> across the biggest range possible.
>
You do recognize that some people would consider feeding
themselves and their family reason enough to comply with a demand
for .NET support? You don't have to support anything you don't
want to support. I'm just saying not everyone has that luxury.


<snip>
> > If .NET is not compatible with the LGNU, then I can
understand
> > that providing .NET support would be like aiding and abetting
a
> > violation of the LGNU license. Bummer.
>
> If you've followed the idiotic acrobats happening between SCO
and IBM (and
> indirectly affecting the open source community) you will
probably have noted
> that some open source projets that used to have SCO support
have stopped
> supporting their OS. So even though you may not have much
interest in
> politics, some people do.
> You will also have people demanding that their portions of
programs get
> pulled out. I once watched how some written documentation grew
into
> something fairly decent, but due to disputes and other issues,
people
> started demanding their contributions be pulled out, by the
time things
> cleared, the documentation was a skeleton of it's best form
since some
> fairly good additions had to get yanked out.
>
> .NET wasn't created in a vacuum, it should have some way of you
to be able to
> pull older code into it and get it permanently sucked-in, so
looking at it
> that way, what you could probably do is see what commands will
work across a
> fairly large range (including on .NET), for example, instead of
following
> very specific .NET commands, you choose what commands have the
best effect
> across the largest range possible so it will work equally well
on Borland,
> Visual C, .NET, Visual Age, gcc, etc... sort of like Kevin is
doing by
> trying to maintain 2.95 compatibility.
> However, like I pointed out earlier, we can render an opinion,
but final say
> is with the maintainer.
>
I'm not sure I follow what you're proposing. Can you explain?
<snip>

I've been reviewing what I leaned about Ole and components. I
recall that Ole expects character data in wide characters. Aspell
supports Unicode, right? And yet it seems like most everything is
stored as bytes. How does that work?

Have you considered reading all text files as UTF8 and storing
character data as wide characters internally?