[Mapserver-dev] Internationalization of MapServer

[Howard Butler]

Folks,

I saw that Julien checked in code that closes out bug 858 and implements 
encoding support in CVS MapServer.  This is a great feature, but I have a 
couple of questions regarding encodings, builds, and their impact.

1.  The encoding support requires the GNU iconv library.  I see that there 
is a conditional #ifdef USE_ICONV in mapgd.c to enable encodings.  Will 
iconv be optional to use with MapServer?

2.  If iconv is *not* optional, this makes life really interesting.  iconv 
support in gd means that both GD and FreeType need to be compiled with 
it.  In windows land, most folks use the pre-compiled binaries for both GD 
and FreeType that don't normally come with this compiled in.

While iconv support is fairly trivial in unix-like installations, getting 
it and the other two required libraries (GD and freetype) compiled together 
and working correctly could be a monumental task for someone attempting to 
compile a windows build.

Howard