Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Increasing the filename space (Or: begging for trouble?)

[Aaron Bentley]

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 11:38, Johannes Berg wrote:
> > Ugh.  TLA has logs as files, not data.  So if the log file is written in
> > ISO-8859-2, TLA should not rewrite the file as UTF-8.
> 
> Thats what I'm saying though. If TLA keeps everything 7-bit clean, then you
> can use whatever you want in the log yourself.

Arch is meant to be a distributed system.  Indecipherable logs are an
impediment to that.

> > Perhaps make-log should supply a Content-encoding header based on the
> > local character encoding?
> 
> I thought about that too -- but still doesn't help, I have my locale set to
> ISO-8859-15 and still edit files in UTF-8 sometimes... :)

Incorrect default headers can be solved a number of ways.

If make-log supplies the wrong header, you can:
- edit the header by hand
- use a script to override your locale before invoking make-log, or
- use a script to rewrite the header, or
- supply a character-encoding override to make-log, or
- use a script to convert the encoding to ISO-8859-15 after you edit it.

> > Or do we attempt to detect and reject files that aren't utf-8/ascii?
> 
> Thats likely to be impossible.
> 
> IMHO the only sensible way to handle this problem is not to handle it at
> all, keep TLA internals inside the logs (filenames and headers that tla
> uses) 7-bit clean, and let the user/policy decide what they do.

That's not going to work as soon as someone with a utf-8 locale reads an
iso-8859-15 log file.

Aaron

-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.