Hi Willi,

> On Jun 23, 2025, at 6:31 AM, Fritz Mueller via Freedos-devel 
> <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Jerome,
> german uses only the special characters: äÄ, öÖ,üÜ and ß, these are even part 
> of CP 437.
> So I think adding german should work.
> You can find the characters äöü at 
> https://fd.lod.bz/repository/latest/html/de/index.html.
>  
> I am sure ÄÖÜ will work too.
>  
> So it is enough to simply copy the german index.html to IBIBLIO to test if 
> you can see these characters.
>  
> ä is at section disk utilities and Gerätetreiber, "Datenträger" 
> "Gerätetreiber"
> ö is at section Spiele, "können"
> ü is at section Netzwerk, UNIX-artige and utilities, "nützlich" or 
> "unterstützen".
> ß can be simply replaced by "ss" within a word, everyone will understand it.
> In older help files I used "ae" "oe" "ue" and "ss" instead of äöüß to avoid 
> codepage problems.

Unfortunately, they do not work either. 

So, the Configuration for FDRepo has the other languages turned off at present. 
 However,
those files have not been deleted. They are still present on the server. FDRepo 
just is not 
creating them or linking to them from any of the English pages or indexes.

You can see the what the server itself is by visiting one of the initial pages 
that is not 
currently being updated at:

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/index_de.html
 
<https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/index_de.html>

You can even surf around as long as you do not switch to English or try and 
download
any packages. 

The problem is not conversion from CodePage to UTF-8 by FDRepo or any of the 
pages it creates.
FDrepo does not rely on external tools to perform the conversion and the 
process works great on
both macOS and Linux machines. The result of this conversion can be seen on my 
unofficial repository.

I have verified that the HTML pages created on IBIBLIO were generated correctly 
correctly and do
actually contain the correct UTF-8 characters.

The problem is the HTTPD server itself. It is incorrectly performing some sort 
of erroneous conversion
on any character that is not English. Sadly, we do not control that server and 
cannot adjust its settings
to prevent the web server from mangling non-English characters.

But, there is good news. Although we cannot fix the HTTPD server, Jim had an 
idea on a possible 
work around. I did some manual tests and the results were good and I have a 
solution.

What I need to do to get the translated pages (and actually a few English ones) 
to be displayed 
properly on IBIBLIO is add a feature to FDRepo to convert any non-English UTF-8 
character to
a HTML entity. 

In other words any such character would get replaced by things like “&#1234;” 
or “&trade;”. When 
using such values instead of the UTF-8 text, the HTTPD server will pass them 
along without
damaging the HTML file. 

I will just need to add a little code to support that on such servers in FDRepo 
and create the HTML
entity mappings. Creating those mappings will be time consuming and tedious 
work. 

Hopefully, it will not take me too long to complete that. 

>  
> So if you need help for adding /replacing these characters simply ask me.
>  
> Maybe French and Spanish are a little more complex, as they use some special 
> characters.
>  
>  
> Another question: Will Bernd worry about doslfn?
>  
> Willi
>  
>  
> Sent: Sunday, June 22, 2025 at 11:09 PM
> From: "Jerome Shidel via Freedos-devel" <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
> To: "FreeDOS Developers" <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
> Cc: jer...@shidel.net
> Subject: [Freedos-devel] FreeDOS Repos
> Hi All,
> 
> As Jim mentioned, FDRepo v3 has been deployed to the Official Download and 
> Update Repositories on IBIBLIO.
> 
> Mostly, it has been a successful transition from the previous version. There 
> was a strange hiccup that prevented
> using the deployment script that then required manually installing the new 
> version. I say “weird” because the
> server did not support the “pushd” command under a bash shell. Very strange.
> 
> Also, the HTTPD server will not pass non-english UTF-8 characters in the HTML 
> files. It is not an issue with
> FDRepo, the pages or the web browser. It is the HTTPD server. After a few 
> tests, if these characters are
> converted to HTML entities like “&Bernoullis;" or "&#6054;” then the 
> equivalent characters will display correctly in
> a modern browser.
> 
> So for now, the official repos are limited to English. Once, I add an option 
> to perform this mapping on servers
> which require it and create the mapping files, we will turn back on the 
> additional translations.
> 
> Also for many years (and prior to me managing the repos), the repositories 
> have provided an ISO image that
> contains the latest version of the packages in that repository. FDRepo is 
> currently configured to only provide
> an ISO for the 1.4 and latest repositories. Those ISO images are very large 
> and obviously require a large amount
> of bandwidth to provide.
> 
> Do we really need to keep supplying them?
> 
> To me, it seems like a big waste of resources. Resources we are graciously 
> provided for free.
> 
> :-)
> 
> 
> 
> 
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