Messages in this thread | | | From | (H. Peter Anvin) | Subject | Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity | Date | Tue, 17 Feb 2004 07:43:40 +0000 (UTC) |
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Followup to: <16433.38038.881005.468116@samba.org> By author: tridge@samba.org In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > 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. >
Realistically, the only sane way to do this is to set our foot down and say: UTF-8 is *the* encoding. A good step in that direction would be to set utf-8 to be the default NLS in the kernel, but as long as people keep the whole sick idea that we can continue to use locale-dependent encoding we're in for a world of hurt.
That's really the long and short of it. Until people are willing to say "we support UTF-8, anything else and it's anyone's guess what happens" then nothing is going to happen.
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