Future of This Crate

[Philipp Schuster]

From official documentation/comments it appears that ucs2 is a base for String handling in the uefi crate. However, there are exactly two usages in the output protocol implementation (output.rs).

The uefi-crate provides Char16 CString16 and CStr16 to work with UCS-2/UEFI strings, however.

I have the the following variants in mind:

• A: We should move Char16 CString16 and CStr16 from the uefi crate to this crate
• B: drop this crate

I think A would be a good solution.

PS: Am I missing something? Is there a specific reason for the status quo?

Ping @nicholasbishop @GabrielMajeri

[Nicholas Bishop]

I'm in favor of option A as well. I assume that a lot of stuff has just ended up in uefi-rs just by inertia.

[Philipp Schuster]

Nice. I can work on it in the next two weeks.

General question. The encoding looks way to complex, I think. From my perspective, the following encoding would be sufficient:

fn encode_char(char: char) -> UCS2Char {

  let unicode_codepoint = char as u32;
  if (unicode_codepoint <= 0xffff) {
    UCS2Char(unicode_codepoint)
  } else {
    panic!()
  }
}

Am I missing something?

PS: Oh, that is exactly how the Char16 type in the uefi crate does it :D

[Philipp Schuster]

My ideas for version 0.4.0

• Let's wait until rust-osdev/uefi-rs#751 and possible follow-ups are merged
• Use rust edition 2021
• remove all existing functionality as it is covered by the abstractions added in next step
• move Char16, CStr16 and CString16 along will all tests to this crate
• discuss whether we should stick to those names or something like UCS2String or just String so that people work with ucs2::String, ucs2::str and so on
• release this
• use it in uefi

[Gabriel Majeri]

@phip1611 Thanks for the initiative! Option A sounds like a good idea. It fits the general Rust pattern of favoring small, independent crates instead of monolithic ones.

Besides the changes you've mentioned in the comment above, I'd also like to add a few minor clean-ups to the to-do list:

• Rename the master branch to main - for consistency with the uefi-rs repo.
• Activate branch protection rules for main (we already have CI checks, they're just not enforced before merging PRs). We might not actually want this since ucs-rs is a much smaller crate with less risk for breakage, but I'm not certain.
• Create a CHANGELOG.md document and start using tags for labeling releases of the crate (again, not sure if we actually need this from the start, considering the smaller API of this library).

[Nicholas Bishop]

Sounds good. Could you up our access to this repo's settings? Right now I don't have permissions to do the branch rename or update branch protection rules.

[Gabriel Majeri]

Sounds good. Could you up our access to this repo's settings? Right now I don't have permissions to do the branch rename or update branch protection rules.

Whoops, didn't realize there were permission issues. Should be fixed now.

[Nicholas Bishop]

Thanks. I've done the branch rename and added branch protection rules.