i18n and file systems

[Jan Hudec]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 19:08:11 +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> > Some file systems/platforms are unicode through and through - no matter
> > what your terminal encoding is, the file system can still represent and
> > return an unicode path. (Whether python figures this out and uses the
> > appropriate apis is a good question). Examples are NTFS(on win32)
> > (IIRC), and HFS+(with MacOSX). Lets call this unicode safe.
> 
> Linux can approximate this by just declaring that all applications
> *must* pass utf-8 to filesystem calls (or they're broken.)  Or rather, a
> particular distribution could make such a statement. 
> 
> This suggests users might want all paths to be expressed in UTF-8, even
> if they want their terminal and their file contents in ascii or 8859-1.

Except that all shell utilities would be broken under that requirement,
since none of them contains charset conversion code (some of them
understand the charset a bit (so they can hide non-printable chars), but
that's all).

Gtk/Gnome folks are trying to go that way (filenames are always
considered unicode unless G_BROKEN_FILENAMES envvar is set -- which most
people using anything else than ascii or utf-8 have set because of the
other tools that don't think filenames should be unicode).

-- 
						 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec <bulb at ucw.cz>
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