From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261480AbVFMKpS (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Jun 2005 06:45:18 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261466AbVFMKod (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Jun 2005 06:44:33 -0400 Received: from 1-1-10-11a.has.sth.bostream.se ([82.182.131.18]:56239 "EHLO DeepSpaceNine.stesmi.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261465AbVFMKoV (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Jun 2005 06:44:21 -0400 Message-ID: <42AD649E.1020901@stesmi.com> Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 12:49:02 +0200 From: Stefan Smietanowski User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Alexey Zaytsev CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: A Great Idea (tm) about reimplementing NLS. References: In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 0.91.0.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-AntiVirus: checked by Vexira Milter 1.0.7; VAE 6.29.0.5; VDF 6.29.0.100 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi. > I have a Great Idea about improving NLS in the linux kernel and I want > somebody with kernel experience consider if it's good or not, just not > to waste time on writing code that will be rejected. > > First of all, why do I think the current NLS implementation isn't good enough. > > Let's look at a situation. I'm using utf-8 as my default system > charset, and my friend Vasiliy Pupkin, who uses koi8-r, wants to plug > his flash drive (ext3) into my computer. It should work, except all > non-us-ascii filenames will be totally unreadable. The problem is even > bigger if I have an other friend's hard drive with reiserfs and cp1251 > encoded filenames on it. The problem is not only with Russian language > for which we have at least 3 common encodings. Everyone who uses > non-us-ascii letters can face the same problem, since there are at > least 2 encodings for theyr language - utf-8 and an other one used > before utf. > > Some would suggest not to use non-ascii file names at all, some would > say that I should temporary change my locale, some could even offer me > a perl script they wrote when faced the same problem. All these > solutions are inconvenient and conflict with fundamental VFS concepts. > > Instead of adding NLS support to filesystems who don't have it yet, I > think there should be a global NLS layer, to convert file names from > any to any encoding, independent of file system and transparently to > the user. > > So what do you think? Is it all nonsense or maybe I should try to implement it? What do you do when a charset doesn't contain a char that another one does? Compare the two very similar charsets ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 and have the Euro-sign using ISO-8859-15. Then try to make that into something sane. Not knocking you or anything, you just have to think about these pitfalls. // Stefan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32) iD8DBQFCrWSeBrn2kJu9P78RAkZNAKCjRkxx4EnZT+C8wblPB/AH63xz2ACfS4m6 IrVy4TwcwWH2Wm1Va+SN0XI= =SYdz -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----