[wx-dev] Improving wxString proposal (Re: #9672: wx 2.9 Ansi/Unicode Combi-wxString)

[Jeff Tupper]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Marcin Wojdyr <wojdyr at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Jeff Tupper <tupperlists at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> This was written many times. Having two builds was bad, because I had
>>> to test if program compiles with both of them (in addition to testing
>>> 3 wx versions, 4 compilers, 3 platforms, a few different configure
>>> options in my application, ...).
>>
>> OK. Now I'm confused (again...) What does one application have to do with this?
>
> If the application is distributed as source code, supporting only one
> wxWidgets configuration is a PITA for users, because they may have
> installed wx in a different configuration, and then they have to
> download, configure and install another copy of wx, and then they have
> conflicts and ask questions.

Yes.  When I wrote my reply I thought that you had source code
distribution in mind. (Some of the non-wx code I've worked on is
distributed as source code and has to work on different compilers, on
different platforms, and with different configuration options.)

How does making the default encoding for wxStrings utf-8 address this?
Is the goal to get users to abandon already existing wx projects that
are made unusable by this change? Or is the goal to get developers to
rewrite their string algorithms in affected projects? Or are you
assuming that all, or almost all, wx projects use wxStrings the way
you do? [Why?] (If none of these apply, wouldn't we simply see a
proliferation of wchar_t wx configurations sprout up?)

If you are trying to push a single standard, pushing wchar_t would
seem a more obvious choice as it seems far less likely that wchar_t
will cause wx applications to become unusable (than utf-8).