From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261461AbVFMKiY (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Jun 2005 06:38:24 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261464AbVFMKiX (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Jun 2005 06:38:23 -0400 Received: from wproxy.gmail.com ([64.233.184.203]:51269 "EHLO wproxy.gmail.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261461AbVFMKiT convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Jun 2005 06:38:19 -0400 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:reply-to:to:subject:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition; b=T5Sl5eKRHAQ558AbqVs9YhQy3rkO8hczKXhuVS0vdIhFZ/DNGzpbTaQMJJJElNFlf9sPF4Z6u8GzdI9ptbnlt8dkbpWykwwpdLk40eF3D29kZEV+wAizXhzqwirKGrxODS6+rb5XnIyMx7N+Po/npcyEgEFdf1KMDQt39cMrQWE= Message-ID: Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:38:16 +0400 From: Alexey Zaytsev Reply-To: Alexey Zaytsev To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: A Great Idea (tm) about reimplementing NLS. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello. 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? Please CC me, I'm not subscribed.