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

Robin Rosenberg
2004-02-12T15:55:48Z

On Thursday 12 February 2004 09.54, you wrote:
> Andy Isaacson wrote:
> > Why on earth is JFS worried about the filename, anyways? Why has it
> > *ever* had *any* behavior other than "string of bytes, delimited with /,
> > terminated with \0" ?
>
> Perhaps for the same reason that these other in-tree filesystems are
> sensitive to the character encoding:
>
> Joliet (ISO-9660 extension), FAT/VFAT, NTFS, BeFS, SMBFS, CIFS.
>
> Those filesystems will also fail, or give unexpected behaviour (such
> as bytes being changed to '?'), if you pass them names which are not
> in the appropriate encoding.

Definitely a good reason. It seem many assume file names are a local thing,
but this is not so. 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.

-- robin