Jianping,
It's a reasonable set of requirements you laid out. However,
with respect to this last paragraph, as Unicode 3.1 did not
exist when 8i was current, is it not unreasonable to insist
that users wanting to work with 3.1, or in particular supplementary
characters, first must upgrade?
Also, I am not familiar with Oracle's support or patch strategy,
but is it not possible to provide a patch to 8i to detect use
of supplementary characters and warn the user or administrator,
that they need to upgrade?
I sympathize that you cannot force every customer to upgrade,
but usually it is not unreasonable to force every customer that is
using some new capability, which is dependent on changes external
to the product (such as supplementary characters) to upgrade.
tex
Jianping Yang wrote:
>
> People may argue that as there is no supplementary character defined before
> Unicode 3.1, it should be ok to simply update UTF8 to support 4-byte encoding
> without compatibility issue, but the case is not because we cannot force every
> Oracle customers to migrate their database into 9i, which means there is still a
> certain time period that Oracle 8i and 9i would be co-exist. You have to
> consider their compatibility and that's the price we have to pay to support
> Unicode.
>
> Regards,
> Jianping.
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Tex Texin Director, General Product Manager
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