kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/26/2017 1:50 AM, Cirilo Bernardo wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
>  This whole thing with UTF-8 filenames in Windows is a disaster.
> What I've found so far:
> 
> 1. Regarding OCE: Since OCE 0.17 (OpenCascade 6.8) UTF8
> filenames have been supported when built with MSVC but
> obviously not with MinGW.
> 
> 2. MinGW does not provide any means of transparently using
> UTF-8 filenames. All filenames within the STL *must* be
> char* and MinGW *will* simply pass these on to OpenFileA()
> on Windows resulting in UTF-8 being interpreted as ASCII-8
> (and who uses ASCII-8 filenames anyway).
> 
> So everything hinges on (2). If OCE uses std::stream then
> fixing all issues under Windows is a lost cause. If OCE
> simply plays with FILE* then it can be patched to work
> in MinGW by invoking _wfopen() rather than fopen().
> 
> As for kicad itself, std::stream is used in:
> (a) VRML export
> (b) IDF static library
> (c) Scenegraph dynamic library for 3D plugins
> 
> 2 paths forward come to mind and both will involve some work:
> 
> (1) Move to the MSVC build system on Windows: this makes
> it possible for us to use Microsoft extensions to STL to deal
> with non-ASCII filename issues. There is no need to dig into
> the OCE code since we know it will work correctly when built
> with MSVC.

This is not an acceptable solution.  It's not portable and would limit
windows builds to using msvc.

> 
> (2) Rework kicad code to play with FILE* (or wxFileStream)
> rather than std::ifstream/ofstream. Although this will fix the
> issues which are confined to kicad's source, it does nothing
> to address the OCE issue. Whether or not OCE in MinGW
> is a lost cause remains to be seen.

FILE* is how we pretty much do it everywhere else in KiCad with good
results so I don't see any reason not to do it this way with the model
parser code.  At least it's portable across all build platforms.
Doesn't oce have a reader function that takes a FILE *?

> 
> One other possibility (but one which I hadn't looked into)
> is to see if the STL implementation within MinGW uses the
> MinGW-CRT. If it does then it may be possible to fix
> everything by ensuring that the MinGW-CRT converts all
> filenames to UTF16 and opens a file using FileOpenW().
> In all cases this is not a pleasant task.
> 
> Any comments/suggestions?
> 
> - Cirilo
> 
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