Re: JFS default behavior (was: UTF-8 in file systems? xfs/extfs/etc.)

Jamie Lokier
2004-02-13T00:38:42Z

Robin Rosenberg wrote:
Now consider the case with an external firewire
> disk or memory stick created on a machine with iso-8859-1 as the system character
> set and e.g xfs as the file system. What happens when I hook it up to a new redhat
> installation that thinks file names are best stored as utf8? Most non-ascii
> file names aren't even legal in utf8.

It goes wrong. This happens both with filesystems that know nothing
about encodings, e.g. ext3, and filesystems that need to be told what
to transcode to/from utf-8, e.g. ntfs.

It is also a problem that some applications access the filesystem
assuming utf-8 and some don't. Nothing in the filesystem can make the
different applications cooperate regarding these. E.g. I have
filenames that look fine in "ls" containg things like c-cedilla, but
xmms displays them wrongly.

-- Jamie