Re: [RFC] Unicode/UTF-8 support for XFS

Olaf Weber
2014-09-15T07:16:30Z

On 12-09-14 22:55, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 01:55:35PM +0200, Olaf Weber wrote:
>> I looked up those discussions in the archives. For example, here's
>> Christoph about rejecting filenames if they're not well-formed unicode.
>> http://marc.info/?l=linux-fsdevel&m=120876935526856&w=2
>> And Jamie Lokier making a similar point:
>> http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2008-04/msg01263.html
>
> And I might now disagree with my past self. While non-ut8 characters
> are perfectly valid unix filenames, and I think everyones life is easier
> if we generally stay out of the utf8 business it seems that for this
> particular use case (shared filesystem with Windows, right) just
> accepting utf8 should be fine. ZFS is doing, MacOS X apparently is,
> and NFSv4 requires it, although as far as I know most implementations
> ignore that requirement.
>

One issue is working in environments that are not UTF-8 clean. For example,
unpacking a tarball with non-UTF-8 filenames in it. The names would have to
be transcoded, which is only really possible if you know the original
character set. And if the filesystem flat out rejects non-UTF-8 filenames,
then you'd be unable to unpack the tarball at all.

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Olaf Weber SGI Phone: +31(0)30-6696796
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