From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261397AbVFPOho (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:37:44 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261554AbVFPOho (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:37:44 -0400 Received: from thunk.org ([69.25.196.29]:23205 "EHLO thunker.thunk.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261397AbVFPOhh (ORCPT ); Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:37:37 -0400 Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:37:27 -0400 From: "Theodore Ts'o" To: Jeremy Maitin-Shepard Cc: Patrick McFarland , Alan Cox , Alexey Zaytsev , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: A Great Idea (tm) about reimplementing NLS. Message-ID: <20050616143727.GC10969@thunk.org> Mail-Followup-To: Theodore Ts'o , Jeremy Maitin-Shepard , Patrick McFarland , Alan Cox , Alexey Zaytsev , Linux Kernel Mailing List References: <1118690448.13770.12.camel@localhost.localdomain> <200506152149.06367.pmcfarland@downeast.net> <20050616023630.GC9773@thunk.org> <87y89a7wfn.fsf@jbms.ath.cx> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <87y89a7wfn.fsf@jbms.ath.cx> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 12:33:16AM -0400, Jeremy Maitin-Shepard wrote: > > Ext2/3's encoding has always been utf-8. Period. > > In what way does Ext2/3 know or care about file name encoding? Doesn't > it just store an arbitrary 8-byte string? Couldn't someone claim that > from the start it was designed to use iso8859-1 just as easily as you > can claim it was designed to use utf-8? Because we've had this discussion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H flame war years ago, and despite people from Russia whining that that it took 3 bytes to encode each Cyrillic character in UTF-8, it's where we came out. The bottom-line though is that if someone files a bug report with ext3 because one user on the system was is creating filenames in Japanese, and another user on the same time-sharing system is creating filenames in Germany, and they fail to interoperate, and they were doing so in their local language, we would laugh at them --- just as people writing mail programs would laugh at people who complained that they were running into problems Just Sending 8-bits instead of using MIME, and could you please fix this business-critical bug? Or as more and more desktop programs start interpreting the filenames as UTF-8, and people with local variations get screwed, that is their problem, and Not Ours. So no, we can't prevent anyone from shooting them in the foot. However, if they *do* take the gun, aim it straight downwards, and pull the trigger, we aren't obligated to help. - Ted