Re: A Great Idea (tm) about reimplementing NLS.

[Lukasz Stelmach]

MÃns RullgÃrd napisaÅ(a):
>>>What do you do if the underlying filesystem can not store some unicode
>>>characters that are allowed on others?
>>
>>That's why UTF-8 is suggested. UTF-8 has been developed to "fool" the
>>software that need not to be aware of unicodeness of the text it manages
>>to handle it without any hickups *and* to store in the text information
>>about multibyte characters.What characters exactly you do mean? NULL?
>>There is no NULL byte in any UTF-8 string except the one which
>>terminates it.
> 
> That's exactly how ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, etc. all work.  A few
> filesystems are tagged as using some specific encoding.  If your
> filesystem is marked for iso-8859-1, what should a kernel with a
> conversion mechanism do if a user tries to name a file ê?

Return -ENOENT? I am guessing. But please tell me what should do
userland software if it runs with locale set to something.iso-8859-2 and
finds ê in the directory? That is the same problem. And for now ISO
8-bit encodings are far more popolar and usefull with contemporary tools
than UTF-8. That is why I think suggestion of a layer in the kernel that
would translate filenames form utf-8 stored on the media to e.g. latin2
used by tools is quite reasonable. Especially when there is more than
one encoding for a particular language (think Russian, Polish). Even
more, with such a facility transition would be much more greaceful since
you could have utf-8 filesystem and then you can worry about tools other
tools. The filesystem is already populated with UFT-8 names.

>>>I think UDF is a better filesystem for many types of media since it is
>>>able to me more gently to the sectors storing the meta data than VFAT
>>>ever will be.
>>I've tried cd packet writing with UDF and it gives insane overhead of
>>about 20%. What metadata you'd like to store for example on your
>>flashdrive or a floppy disk?
> 
> Filename, timestamps, all the usual.

That's why IMHO FAT is quite enough for this purpose.

-- 
ByÅo mi bardzo miÅo.                    Trzecia pospolita klÄska, [...]
>Åukasz<                      JuÅ nie katolicka lecz zÅodziejska.  (c)PP

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