Re: JFS default behavior

Robin Rosenberg
2004-02-14T23:06:28Z

On Saturday 14 February 2004 16.40, you wrote:
> The same goes for file names. Filename is a sequence of bytes, no more and
> no less. Anything beyond that belongs to applications.

Should be a sequence of characters since humans are supposed to use them and
it should be the same characters wheneve possible regardless of user's locale.

The "sequence of bytes" idea is a legacy from prehistoric times when byte == character
was true. That is no longer the case and actually hasn't been for quite a while in
some parts of the world. Interchange is important. The application cannot handle
this since it cannot know what characters a byte string represents. Fixing it in the
kernel is the simple solution since it knows the locale. Its also a small change I
believe. Having an iocharset options for all file systems make it backward compatible
and creates a migration path to UTF-8 as system default locale.

-- robin