Internationalization Support

[Bradley Baetz]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 05:38:07PM -0500, David Miller wrote:
> There's some folks at Netscape who have a strong interest in making
> Bugzilla be completely i18n in the near future.
> 
> Seems like the most obvious thing to do would be to force everything to be
> UTF-8, everywhere.
> 
> However, digging around and doing a little research, it looks like we'd
> need to use perl 5.8.0 and MySQL 4.1 in order to pull that off...
> 

Well, that depends on how you define 'support' :)

AIUI, given a valid utf8 string, we don't have to worry about it
matching only part of another utf8 byte in another string. This is due
to the prefix bytes, and so on.

Since we don't use database stuff like length and so on, we should be
able to get away with what we have. The only thing we would need is
input validation, and then the perl code cna treat everything as bytes
(with |use bytes|)

I think a first step would be to do that, possibly only supporting
comments/summary/status whiteboard if its easier to do that way. (I
don't think it is, though. UTf8 platform/OS will be more difficult,
because it in localconfig. We can live without that, I think)

'Validation' may be better off being done by modifying CGI.pm, because
its simpler that way. We may need to require 5.6.1 though, or at least
strongly recommend it.

Bradley