[Gdal-dev] RFC DRAFT: Unicode support in GDAL

[Marek Brudka]

Hi,

    From my painfull practice as well from the knowledge of other 
libraries and some standards comes the following rule of thumb: *use 
wide chars* and do not make *implicite* assumptions about encoding (here 
UTF8). This means that:
- GDAL should be extended with overloaded, i18n aware and wchar driven 
methods/interfaces .
- GDAL drivers should make all necessary conversion from and to wchars.

I know that this proposition is really expensive in working hours and is 
not the shortest path to i18n compliant GDAL. But I also know that such 
attempt will:
 - simplify GDAL interfaces and make them *explicite *with respect to i18n.
 - enable smooth transition for existing applications.
 - avoid yet another copy of strings, because many libraries already 
provides wchar driven interfaces.

Regards
Marek