Hi, folks!
Again I will bring an old debate about codepages for Portuguese language, but sometimes it happens at other languages too.
From long, long ago, there was many software drawing box characters, for better formatting and good presentation. Clipper language programs are the most notable ones, but there were too many others, such as Norton Utilities, etc.
Microsoft defaulted to use CP 850, because they want less support calls for the entire European country in the days. CP 850 does the job most of time, and the ones wanting to use box characters can adjust their systems themselves.
But, in the default codepage for Portuguese language (CP 850), single box characters were changed to accommodate other accented characters not used in Portuguese, leading us to CP 860.
CP 860 has all characters needed for box drawing, and is absolutely perfect for Portuguese and Brazilian language. The characters replaced in CP 850 are not used for native Portuguese, but are useful in multi-language setups.
I think CP 860 is better as default to Portuguese speaking users in SvarDOS. Microsoft used to CP 850 because it made initial setup more easy, but in trust it was not needed most of time.
Chars changed to accommodate specific needs happens in other codepages too.. what do you think?
I understand that CP860 was historically used in Portugal, so using it for Portuguese seems indeed like a logical thing to do, even if it impacts Portuguese-speaking people in other countries, like Brazil.
Changing the SvarDOS installer is fairly easy, but then it will also require re-releasing all CORE packages that include *.BR translations since these translations need to be converted to CP860.
This will also be a potential problem for people already having a SvarDOS installation set to LANG=BR in CP850: when an updated package will be installed (eg. through pkgnet), its output will be garbled, because it will output text in CP860 on a CP850 system. This might be a non-issue problem, though, if, as I suspect, our Portuguese user base is 1 person. :-)
Mateusz