Java 8 RFR 8011194: Apps launched via double-clicked .jars have file.encoding value of US-ASCII on Mac OS X

[Brent Christian]

Please review my fix for 8011194 : "Apps launched via double-clicked 
.jars have file.encoding value of US-ASCII on Mac OS X"

http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=8011194

In most cases of launching a Java app on Mac (from the cmdline, or from 
a native .app bundle), reading and displaying UTF-8 characters beyond 
the standard ASCII range works fine.

A notable exception is the launching of an app by double-clicking a .jar 
file.  In this case, file.encoding defaults to US-ASCII, and characters 
outside of the ASCII range show up as garbage.

(FWIW, this is not recommended by Apple as a method for deploying Java 
apps [1], though OS X does have a Jar Launcher.app to make it work.)

It's worth mentioning that this is not something that has ever worked on 
MacOS X. (Apple's JRE defaulted to "MacRoman" for English and AFAIK most 
European locales.  I believe this is a holdover from the pre-OS X days).

Even so, the situation can be improved.  When launching, if the standard 
encoding comes up as  US-ASCII, but there are no hints from the 
environment (e.g. LANG/etc environment variables), it would be sane to 
instead use UTF-8 as the default encoding on MacOS X.  An explicit 
file.encoding setting by the user is still honored (and can even be set 
back to US-ASCII).

I believe this also fixes the related issue with webstart [2].

Webrev is here:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~bchristi/8011194/webrev.00/

Thanks,
-Brent

[1] 
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Java/Conceptual/Java14Development/03-JavaDeployment/JavaDeployment.html
[2] http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=8011195