Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 16 Feb 2004 21:20:43 +0100 | From | Marc Lehmann <> | Subject | Re: UTF-8 practically vs. theoretically in the VFS API |
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On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 11:48:35AM -0800, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote: > works on the raw byte sequence and isn't confused). Basically accept the > fact that UTF-8 strings can contain "garbage", and don't try to fix it up.
But you are wrong, UTF-8 strings never contain garbage. UTF-8 is well-defined and is always proper UTF-8. It's a tautology.
The evry idea of "UTF-8 with garbage in it" doesn't make sense.
> And no, I'm not claiming that it's wonderfully clean and that we should > all love it.
It's also a totally useless idiom...
> And it largely works today. > Linus
On ascii-only-systems, it works fine. My system is largely ascii-only, with only very few filenames (japanese and german ones mostly) in UTF-8. Sometimes in EUC-JP, but that's a bug in rar.
It also works fine in single-user environments where the user just forces everything to be in her locale. It does fail miserably on multi-user systems. It does fail miserably in ISO-C's locale model. It does fail miserably with gnu shellutils, fileutils and most other apps.
It fails, because it's not at all well supported by the kernel.
Claiming that it largely works today is simply not true for most non-ascii-users (which increasingly includes the US).
-- -----==- | ----==-- _ | ---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann +-- --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / pcg@goof.com |e| -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ XX11-RIPE --+ The choice of a GNU generation | | - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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