What problems do you actually have with MacRoman? If you aren't
running into it's probably a 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'
situation isn't it? It's a risky change since you might mess
things up for all jvm's. If it doesn't fix a problem why do it?
I don't think there is a way to change this for the scope you
want. If there were it would probably be located in a properties
file somewhere like
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/lib
it will probably require root permissions to make any changes if
you do find a properties setting to control this. I'd still
suspect there isn't one.
The problem is that it's hard to catch errors in file encoding. For
example, one of our developers was writing strings containing the
copyright symbol. The file encoding was MacRoman, and because she
was on a Mac, the java compiler (correctly) assumed that the file
was MacRoman and generated code that ended up outputting a MacRoman-
encoded copyright symbol. The code ends up outputting a UTF-8
encoded byte stream, and so on her machine the webapp behaved
correctly.
However, building on the linux server, javac interpreted the source
file as UTF-8, and of course the resulting output was incorrect.
Had the Mac been assuming UTF-8 everywhere, this problem would've
been detected very early, and hours of hunting might've been avoided.
If the developer wrote the software correctly it would not make any
assumptions about the encoding and be explicit in choosing an
encoding when going in and out of String instances, etc. It is
generally a bad programming practice to use the default encoding on
any platform.
If I could set the file encoding system-wide, then javac would also
use the right encoding.
I don't see why Mac OS X still has MacRoman encoding in the jvm...
Mac OS X had/has to support users coming over from Mac OS. Mac OS
used Mac Roman as its default encoding. That is why the default
encoding was selected to be Mac Roman on Mac OS X.
-Shawn
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