unicode filenames

[Carlos Ribeiro]

On Thursday 06 February 2003 11:16 am, Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
> Since unix can afford to change all APIs and programs like windows did
> (the mess that resulted explains why <wink>), unix must stay with the
> byte-orineted filenames at the low level.  This ensures that all programs
> that store file names in files, etc., continue to work.  UTF-8 is the only
> encoding that can represent all of unicode that satisfies all these needs,
> so everybody should migrate to UTF-8 filenames (CJK users might have
> reservations to this; I'd be happy to learn their opinion).

Sorry. It would be a big mess. Here in Brazil, I can safely assume that it is 
nearly impossible to find a computer *without* filenames with latin-1 
accented characters. Not to mention the problems that we have when mounting 
FAT partitions under Linux - many Unix users still need to use dual boot 
machines in order to use a few Windows apps.

In my opinion, this is the type of problem that has to be solved at its root, 
by slowly migrating the filesystem itself to accept only UTF-8 filenames. All 
conversions during the migration phase have to be done by the operating 
system itself; when moving files from one FS to the other, it would do the 
necessary conversions. It's not going to be easy, though.


Carlos Ribeiro
cribeiro at mail.inet.com.br