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Date: Tue, 7 Sep 1999 17:03:52 -0500
To: lwn@lwn.net
From: Geoff Hutchison <ghutchis@wso.williams.edu>
Subject: Re: ht://Dig Development update

Hi again,

I hope I'm not too late for this week. I have an update on ht://Dig
development (they should be coming more frequently again). In addition, I
have an announcement about our Unicode effort.

Geoff Hutchison wrote in with a development update on ht://Dig. With
several outstanding bugfixes, there will be a 3.1.3 release for all
production servers in the next few days. In the meantime, work is reaching
completion on the first beta release of 3.2.0. In the last two weeks, the
database formats have stabilized, and full phrase searching is supported in
the latest snapshot. At this point, the last major hurdle to the 3.2.0b1
release is a cleanup of the connection and transport code.

In related news, we've been interested in adding support for multibyte
characters using a robust Unicode library. Several open-source libraries
exist and each has their own strengths and weaknesses. At a minimum, there
are:

       libunicode C :
http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=libunicode
       recode-3.5 : http://www.gnu.org/software/recode/recode.html
       glibc-2.1 iconv/wchar : http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/libc.html
       Perl-5.006 C : http://www.perl.com/
       IBM ICU C++ : http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/icu/

A development list was started by Loic Dachary <loic@ceic.com> for
discussing how these efforts can result in a useful application library,
usable by any number of developers to make internationalization and
localization much easier. To join the 'Software i18n and localization'
mailing list (so far no activity), see
http://www.egroups.com/group/sw-i18n-l10n/info.html

Thanks,
-Geoff