System properties

[Andrew Thompson]

At one point I recall Apple stating they picked the default encodings for the JVM on the basis of what was most likely to work. 

Around the time of the transition to OSX most plaintext files coming from English  os9 machines would have been MacRoman. So unless my memory fails me MacRoman was the default at some point, because that would work best for those files, but whether MacRoman was ever the default on OSX or just on 9 I don't recall. 

A lot of time has now passed, so UTF8 is probably a better default. But really, does Apple's Java 6 report MacRoman for the default encoding on a US English system even today? If so changing it in 7 will break some existing apps. 

On May 21, 2012, at 11:35 PM, Michael Hall <mik3hall at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On May 21, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Xueming Shen wrote:
> 
>> Whether or not this is a bug depends on your locale setting.  If your locale is set to C locale,
>> then the US-ASCII is the correct pick, if your locale is using UTF-8 as its encoding (I would
>> assume this should be the default setting), then this property should be UTF-8. Command
>> "locale" tells you your current locale setting and "locale -a" tells you all the choices. I'm
>> still setting/upgrading my leopard, so I can't verify what JDK7 is doing with various locale
>> settings, but I don't see any thing special in prop_md.c...
> 
> locale
> LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
> 
> and a number of LC_ attributes(?) also set to en_US.UTF-8.
> So file.encoding=US-ASCII would be right.
> So this change is a feature not a bug, it now uses the more appropriate locale setting rather than a hardcoded MacRoman?
> 
>