If there were any reason to do it, you could create a personality which
used (for example) UTF-16 instead. With a bit of work, you could write
a libc which could work properly with either the UTF-8 or the UTF-16
personality (a crude one, might perhaps use a boot mechanism which
points at a different ld.so, depending).
At this point, your applications wouldn't know what internal
representation the kernel used. You might even have it so that
some devices were utf-8 and others were utf-16 (so, yes, yet
another configuration parameter to get wrong).
Anyways, point is: you can change the interfaces, if you decide
it's worth the work. Right now, though, the only applications I've
used under linux which are unicode-aware are things derived from
plan-9, and these are perfectly happy with utf-8. (9fonts is also
the only unicode font (utf-2) I've got).
However, the last thing we want to do is implement utf-16 in the kernel
because microsoft/apple says that they're going to someday.
-- Raul- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu