Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity | From | Dave Kleikamp <> | Date | Tue, 17 Feb 2004 08:25:17 -0600 |
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On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 22:12, tridge@samba.org wrote: > Given how much pain the "kernel is agnostic to charset encoding" > attitude has cost me in terms of programming pain, I thought I should > de-cloak from lurk mode and put my 2c into the UTF-8 issue. > > Personally I think that eventually the Linux kernel will have to > embrace the interpretation of the byte streams that applications have > given it, despite the fact that this will be very painful and > potentially quite complex. The reason is that I think that eventually > the Linux kernel will need to efficiently support a userspace policy > of case-insensitivity and the only way to do case-insensitive filename > operations is to interpret those byte streams as a particular > encoding. > > Personally I much prefer the systems I use to be case-sensitive, but > there are important applications that require case-insensitivity for > interoperability. Right now it is not possible to write a case > insensitive application on Linux in an efficient manner. With the > current "encoding agnostic" APIs a simple open() or stat() call > becomes a horrendously expensive operation and one that is fraught > with race conditions. Providing the same functionality in the kernel > is dirt cheap by comparison (not cheap in terms of code complexity, > but cheap in terms of runtime efficiency).
This would be easy to do in JFS due to the baggage we carried over to be compatible with OS/2-formatted volumes. In OS/2, the directories were ordered in a case-insensitive fashion. This would have to be a mkfs option, and would not be a per-process option. The directories must be created either case-sensitive or not.
Shaggy -- David Kleikamp IBM Linux Technology Center
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