KCodecs - Quick Review

[Mario Fux KDE ML]

Am Dienstag, 04. März 2014, 16.58:11 schrieb John Layt:
> Hi,

Morning

Just a short notice. It looks as if the description on projects.kde.org for 
KCodecs is wrong:


Thx
Mario

> I know nothing about text codecs, but I've had a *very* quick look at
> KCodecs:
> 
> * Original code by Lars dated 1999!
> * One method marked as deprecated to be removed for KDE4
> * "###FIXME KDE4: the name of the encodings should mostly be uppercase"
> * Code generated by script generate_string_table.pl located in
> kdesdk/scripts * Algorithms marked as copyright by RSA Data Security and
> others, but no mention what the original licence was or real link to
> original source * Encoding probers and lookup tables marked as copyright
> Mozilla 1998, X11 license
> * kentities.c is documented as generated by gperf from either
> kentities.gperf and/or khtmlentities.gperf but neither are in kcodecs,
> instead they are in khtml as is another copy of kentities.c.
> * Public API using boolean parms
> 
> This suggests it could do with some attention:
> * Check still valid to remove deprecated code?
> * Check if encoding names should be made uppercase?
> * The generate_string_table.pl script should probably be moved into
> KCodecs, unless it has more general use?
> * The RSA and other algorithms may need checking for licensing issues, or
> at least improve the license documentation?
> * The probers may need to be checked they are still up to date with the
> original Mozilla code and look-up tables?
> * kentities.c needs investigation and I suspect moving all the files from
> khtml to kcodecs, with khtml then using kcodecs?  Or at least docs added
> that this is where it comes from and should be kept in sync.
> 
> I wonder how much of this functionality is now done in Qt5?  Would it
> benefit from a functional review by someone who knows what they're doing,
> like Thiago or David?
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> John.