Jim Rees wrote:
>   authentication identities to AFS ID's), the AFS directory format (to 
>   support unicode filenames and >64K files per directory),
> 
> Does the directory format have to change for unicode?  I'm pretty sure it
> will hold utf-8 with no changes.  Other things would have to change of
> course.

Unfortunately, simply storing utf8 encoding has all the security and
usability issues that the web is currently experiencing.   In order to
do this correctly, the client and server must refer to directory entries
by a normalized version of the name using a String Prep profile.   One
side effect of the normalization process is that the resulting string
can not be displayed as the user intended.  Therefore, for a Unicode
directory entry there must be two strings stored:  the normalized string
that is used for directory searches and a display string that is the
string the user entered.  The end result is that if there are N ways
of entering a particular filename, all N of them will find the same
file and all users will see the same display string regardless of what
they entered.

At the same time the directory format is extended to support Unicode
we should also make changes to support multiple data streams per file
and a method of supporting additional file attributes.

Jeffrey Altman

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