Unicode and APIs

[Sam Hartman]

>>>>> "Jeffrey" == Jeffrey Altman <jaltman at secure-endpoints.com> writes:

    Jeffrey> Sam Hartman wrote:
    >>  Ken mentioned in another post that he suspected that adding
    >> internationalization support would require significant API
    >> work.
    >> 
    >> I'd like to challenge that assumption.
    >> 
    >> How badly will things break if we add a context flag that says
    >> "everything is UTF8" and minimize other API changes?
    >> 
    >> --Sam

    Jeffrey> That would certainly work for the interface between the
    Jeffrey> MIT library and the calling application.

Let's focus on the API issue for now.  Ken disagrees with you or at
least implied he did by saying that it would be hard.  Let's see what
his concerns are.

    Jeffrey> I think the challenge will be credential caches, keytabs,
    Jeffrey> replay caches, etc.  Those are resources which are shared
    Jeffrey> with other Kerberos implementations that will not
    Jeffrey> necessarily be happy if the character sets changes.


I agree the second stage of this question will be to what extent we
care about interop with old versions of ourself or other
implementations with different character set choices on the same
system.

I suspect the answer is not "ignore the issue completely."