Re: [OpenAFS-devel] AFS vs UNICODE

[Roland Kuhn]

On 10 May 2008, at 11:40, Erik Dalén wrote:

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:27 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hello Mattias,

On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 09:47:17PM +0200, Mattias Pantzare wrote:

File system drivers can not fully implement the stated change

unless each process has its own encoding-aware view of the file system

You are forgetting that the AFS client can translate between Unicode
and the native charset on the client. If I run my Solaris client in

depends on the choice of each running process (in the first hand on
the locale used by the process).

Note that there is no "character set of the client", the character set

In Mac OS X there is a "character set of the client", all applications
use UTF-8-NFD. In Windows the "character set of the client" is now
UTF-8-NFC.
But you're right, in other clients there is just a default charset,
and no guarantee that all applications will use that. However, I think
it would be useful to at least have the option to for example
translate between UTF-8-NFC which is used in the cell to ISO-8859-1
which happens to be the default charset on some clients. Or vice
versa. Both samba and netatalk have this option, and it helps in some
situations. But sure, it should be optional on Unix clients.

Where does this stupid idea come from that there is something like a "default charset on some clients"? This whole mess with filesystems and/or applications which insist on using this notion are nothing but a major PITA as soon as you have users from different parts of the world sharing e.g. one institute network. I never actually managed to get TSM to backup _all_ files, because I could find no locale in which simply all byte values are legal constituents of file names. That's not what a backup software is supposed to care about: it should take files and their meta data to a safe place, from which they can be retrieved IN THEIR ORIGINAL FORM later on. Nothing else.

Keep it simple.

Ciao,
                    Roland

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Don't make that same mistake with a supposedly "global" filesystem. Keep in mind that filesystem semantics are very clearly defined for POSIX systems and users expect them to work in that way. And: users WILL ALWAYS use your system in ways previously unimaginable! GS/CS/M/MU d-(++) s:+ a-> C+++ UL++++ P+++ L+++ E(+) W+ !N K- w--- M+ ! V Y+

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