People are advocating normalisation as a solution for various kinds of
file name confusion, but I can imagine normalisation making things
worse.

For example, file names with a trailing space can certainly be
confusing, but would life be any simpler if some programmer decided to
strip trailing white space at some point in the processing of a file
name? I don't think so. You would then potentially have files that are
not just hard to delete, but impossible to delete.

I'm not even convinced that it's a good idea to force file names to be
in UTF-8. Perhaps it would be simpler and more robust to let file
names be any null-terminated string of octets and just recommend that
people use (some normalisation form of) UTF-8. That way you won't have
the problem of some files (with ill-formed names) being visible
locally but not remotely because the server or the client is either
blocking the names or "normalising" them in some weird and unexpected
way.

What's so bad about just being 8-bit clean?

It saves CPU-cycles, too.

Edmund
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/

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