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

Eduard Bloch
2004-02-14T15:24:27Z

#include <hallo.h>
* John Bradford [Thu, Feb 12 2004, 07:08:06PM]:

> Well, as long as every userspace implementation gets it correct, we'll
> be OK. Personally, I doubt they all will, especially those that
> convert from legacy encodings to Unicode, although quite possibly the
> above scenario with combining characters is not likely to happen for
> filenames. Or is it? What about copying a file from a filesystem
> with a UTF-8 encoding to a filesystem with a legacy encoding, and then
> back again?

I always wondered why there is no "iocharset" option for unixoid
filesystems. IMO there could be an easy migration path for existing
installations to UTF-8:

- convert all filenames to UTF-8 (or any other Unicode encoding)
- mount the FS with "iocharset=UTF-8,charset=latin1" (for current
Latin1 users). Users can continue to use their latin1 names while
they are stored in Unicode on the disk (this is what currently
happens with VFAT, a very nice solution IMHO)
- when enough applications are ready for multibyte encodings, remove
the charset/iocharset workaround and make people use .UTF-8 locales

Though, the ultimate solution for the steps 2. and 3. would be the
Microsoft-like way:

- convert the filenames in libc (from $locale to UTF-8), depending on
which locale the user has set

This sounds like cheating but would allow to be most flexible and most
compatible to encoding-ignoring applications.

Eduard.
--
Wir sind nichts; was wir suchen ist alles.
-- Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin