Potential Modifications to NLS as of HP-UX 11i

The NLS configuration file is an HP-specific file and not specified by standards, and as such, it is subject to change in future releases. The /usr/lib/nls/config file may be moved to /usr/lib/nls/loc/config.

The utility getlocale(3C) may become obsolete or modified due to standards requirements.

The command findmsg(1) may become obsolete.

The commands dumpmsg(1), findstr(1), forder(1), insertmsg(1), nljust(1), and eucset(1) are HP-proprietary or nonstandard utilities, that may become obsolete over time as standard utilities emerge. Usage of these utilities are not portable to other vendor's platforms.

HP-proprietary 9.x locale names may become obsolete in favor of ISO standard locale names.

The locales ja_JP.kana8 and katakana may become obsolete. The locales el_GR.greek8, iw_IL.hebrew8,and tr_TR.turkish8 are provided for backwards compatibility and may become obsolete in the next major release in favor of el_GR.iso88597, iw_IL.iso88598 and tr_TR.iso88599.

The processing of right-to-left languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew may change due to emerging standards. Some directly affected components include:

Other utilities may also be affected less directly.

The fr_FR.* locales will eventually be modified to handle translations (toupper(3C)) from lower case characters with diacritics to upper case characters with diacritics. Currently most diacritics are lost in the lower case to upper case translation.

In our efforts to comply with standards, the default codeset for many Western European languages may be changed from ROMAN8 to ISO 8859/1 in future releases.

X/Open is investigating an interface that retrieves the locale settings. When this interface is finalized, it may be provided in a future release.

Future releases of the fontserver will not support the following Hewlett-Packard proprietary XLFD extensions:

The Hewlett-Packard proprietary weightname extension used to specify darker or lighter fonts will be supported.

The Hewlett-Packard syntax for the charset encoding extension is obsolete and is removed in a future version of the font server.

The second component of the HP-UX 10.0 default NLSPATH may become obsolete in the next major release leaving only this path:

/usr/lib/nls/msg/%L/%N.cat

Future MSE changes:

ISO/MSE 9899:1990/Amendment 1:1994(E) defines extensions to ISO/MSE:1990 Programming Language -C. The amendment provides a more complete and consistent set of utilities for application programming using multibyte and wide-character functions, as well as providing alternate spellings for language-specific tokens. ANSI C has since adopted this amendment, and X/Open will eventually align with this amendment.