[xwiki-devs] [vote] XWiki charset strategy

Hi devs, We need to decide how to handle the charset/encoding in XWiki. We have 3 options: 1. Leave it as it is. The default is ISO-8859-1, and the admin has to make sure the JVM is started with the correct -Dfile.encoding param. If another encoding is needed, it has to be changed in 4 places (web.xml, xwiki.cfg, -Dfile.encoding, database charset+collation) 2. Force it to always be UTF-8, overriding the file.enconding setting. This ensures internationalization, as UTF-8 works with any language. And I think it is a safe move, as any modern system supports UTF-8 (given that XWiki requires java 5, we can assume it will be in a modern system). This has the advantage that the code will be simpler, as we don't have to check and switch encodings, but has the disadvantage that mysql has to be manually configured for UTF-8, as by default it comes in latin1. 3. Keep it configurable, but by only specifying it in one place (xwiki.cfg or web.xml), and enforcing that encoding in the JVM (by overriding file.encoding). The default should be UTF-8. Here's my +1 for option 2, -1 for option 1, and 0 for option 3. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/