Re: UTF-8 practically vs. theoretically in the VFS API (was: Re: JFS default behavior)

John Bradford
2004-02-17T21:09:14Z

Quote from Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>:
>
>
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, John Bradford wrote:
> >
> > Why not:
>
> I'll start with the first one. That already kills the rest.
>
> > * State that filenames are strings of 32-bit words. UCS-4 should be
> > the prefered format for storing text in them, but storing legacy
> > encodings in the low 8 bits is acceptable, (but a Bad Thing for new
> > installations).
>
> UCS-4 is as braindamaged as UCS-2 was, and for all the same reasons.
>
> It's bloated, non-expandable, and not backwards compatible.

Which I hardly see as real pain for filenames, especially as I covered
the backward compatibility bit anyway, and wanting to expand beyond
2^31 characters isn't really on my to-do list at the moment, which
just leaves filename bloat, which is laughably trivial in at least
99.9% of cases, and probably just a minor inconvenience the other
0.1%.

But, I don't think I care anymore, anyway, clearly we are going to end
up with UTF-8 filenames everywhere, and security vulnerabilities to go
with them, and as long as I'm aware of that fact, I should be OK.

John.