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

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 12:33:16AM -0400, Jeremy Maitin-Shepard wrote:
> > Ext2/3's encoding has always been utf-8.  Period.
> 
> In what way does Ext2/3 know or care about file name encoding?  Doesn't
> it just store an arbitrary 8-byte string?  Couldn't someone claim that
> from the start it was designed to use iso8859-1 just as easily as you
> can claim it was designed to use utf-8?

Because we've had this discussion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H flame war
years ago, and despite people from Russia whining that that it took 3
bytes to encode each Cyrillic character in UTF-8, it's where we came out.  

The bottom-line though is that if someone files a bug report with ext3
because one user on the system was is creating filenames in Japanese,
and another user on the same time-sharing system is creating filenames
in Germany, and they fail to interoperate, and they were doing so in
their local language, we would laugh at them --- just as people
writing mail programs would laugh at people who complained that they
were running into problems Just Sending 8-bits instead of using MIME,
and could you please fix this business-critical bug?  

Or as more and more desktop programs start interpreting the filenames
as UTF-8, and people with local variations get screwed, that is their
problem, and Not Ours.

So no, we can't prevent anyone from shooting them in the foot.
However, if they *do* take the gun, aim it straight downwards, and
pull the trigger, we aren't obligated to help.

						- Ted
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