Hi Ales,

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Ales Smodis:

> Since I'm a bit dissatisfied there isn't a Slovenian collation for
> ISO-8859-2 (and am thus using WIN1250), I want to educate myself in

what

> would be required to do to implement one for Firebird. Could someone
> please point me in the right direction?

This page contains information about loadable charsets and collations:
http://www.ibphoenix.com/main.nfs?a=ibphoenix&l=;IBPHOENIX.PAGES;NAME='ibp_collation'
A newer (?) version can be found at:
http://www.brookstonesystems.com/

Last time I checked, the FTP download link at the latter
site didn't work for me, but David emailed me the stuff
on request. I'm unsure whether it would be O.K. to redistribute
directly, so pls ask yourself if needed.

The download at the first link has problems with false MIME
tagging and didn't include the full documentation - last time
I checked.

When compiling for Firebird 1.5, some changes have to be made,
it's on another computer, ask if info is needed.

So after the links+stuff section, the archictectural paragraphs:

I'm also rather dissatisfied with charset and collation handling.

I would at least expect collations for all latin scripts in
Europe, with a choice of ISO-8859-*, WINCP125? and UTF-8 as
character set. But as it is somewhat offending to demand features
in Open Source projects without volunteering to implement them,
I didn't speak out loudly.

Perhaps we should start raising virtual hands on the Developer or
Architecture list, to gather a large and diverse enough group to
start this task?

Some questions about backward compatibility and integration
in the project must be addressed first. Character set defining,
conversion and upper/lowercasing is the easy part then.

The big task is defining the collations - I'm wondering if
it is legal to 'steal' them from Java or the GNU C RTL, as both
seem to implement a large deal of them.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi
Hamburg, Germany