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

[Tom Lord]

    > From: "Tobias C. Rittweiler" <address@hidden>

    > > The other thing is that I think filenames should _also_ just be UTF-8 
    > > and what I'm puzzling over concerning that is if there's an
    > > incremental path to that.

    > Yes. If you go that way, please implement enough error-catchers. To
    > stick to your previous example "when someone adds a file with an
    > 8859-15 name to a project already containing UTF-8 names", I'd like that
    > tla barfs a warning at least when I'm going to merge that patch.


By the way, how are filenames encoded on your local filesystem?

What _should_ happen in this case is that if the UTF-8 name being
added can be transcoded to 8859-15, then it should be.   (The 8859-15
can and should always be converted to UTF-8 for the UTF-8 user.)

If it can not be transcoded -- that's an interesting question but one
that can be contained entirely within a `vu_' module.   One
possibility is, as you suggest, to just barf.   That's certainly the
easiest to implement, though rather crude.

The other possibility is to steal a subset of the file namespace and
use something like UTF-7 for untranscodable names.   This would
sometimes interact poorly with other tools (as when a compiler looks
for an include file whose name it can not recognize) but would work
quite sanely in a huge number of useful circumstances (such as a group
of people working translations of documentation).

-t