[Asterisk-Dev] IAX spec: Text formats and character sets

[Kenny Shumard]

On 4/30/05, Tilghman Lesher <tilghman at mail.jeffandtilghman.com> wrote:
> To be clear, I'm not suggesting never implementing extended character
> support; I just think that if we have multiple parties who are in
> clear disagreement about what form this support should take, it is not
> in our best interest to make a quick decision about it.  Otherwise, we
> stand to cause fragmentation of the community, which is far worse than
> delaying this important decision to some future date.
> 
What about this has to be a quick decision? We can take as long as we
need to to discuss it and decide how to proceed. But the time to do it
is now -- while it's an issue that people are willing to talk about.
How will waiting a month or a year or forever make the issue more
easily soluble? As it stands, we don't all agree on which text
encoding IAX should use. As near as I can tell, we're not all going to
agree, either. We can compromise now, or we can compromise later. If
we do it now then it's solved once and for all and we don't have to
later revisit the same arguments or (potentially) change any IAX
implementations.

That said, I'm not an expert in Unicode or text encoding schemes in
general. I can't give much input on the debate itself, but I can (and
I do!) encourage those more knowledgeable than I am to continue the
discussion until a decision is reached.

> Perhaps some way can be found to allow each proposal to stand as an
> experimental extension, and use several IEs, marked as experimental
> extensions, such that experimental systems can continue to
> interoperate with standard systems.  With this, we can permit each
> proposal to be fully fleshed out in terms of implementation, and make
> a decision that affects the standard definition of IAX2  (IAX2.1?) in
> the future, based upon the merits of each system implementing distinct
> character sets.  I'd propose using IEs 240-255 for this purpose.
> 
This seems a convoluted solution to me. I'm not convinced that we need
to experiment with each (or even multiple) solutions. This would
certainly be robust, but perhaps overkill. I think it's in our best
interest to specify one single method of encoding text.

~K