This is a total lose. The kernel shouldn't *enforce* a certain
character set -- that is the kind of stupidity that Microsoft
operating systems get involved in. The kernel should treat a filename
as an anonymous sequence of bytes, except for '\0' (0x00) and '/'
(0x2f). The only exception should be to support foreign (non-UNIX)
filesystems.
> However, my personal belief is that there should be a policy in
> the kernel to only allow whole characters to be stored; in this case the
> kernel will need to know what encoding is used for file names. I strongly
> suspect that this won't be implemented, though, due to either standards
> compliance or for the benefit of supporting multiple encodings. There is
> a very strong case to be made that character delineation should be left to
> user-space, and if that's what prevails, so be it; I think that libc
> should be able to implement the policy just as well as the kernel.
Exactly; especially since most multibyte encodings will detect a
character that is truncated by a null byte. In particular, UTF-8 will
do so.
-hpa
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