Philippe Verdy wrote:
> Please note Lars, that Unix filesystems are already performing their
> revolution. There are better filesystems for Unix/Linux than
> the old legacy
> UFS, which are more secure with journalisation and RAID, more
> scalable with
> disk arrays or clusters, less fragmented, distributed....
> Many new filesystems have native built-in support for Unicode
> (like NTFS on
> Windows) as their *only* internal encoding, and they
> implicitly translate
> file name requests from user programs from their locale to
> Unicode. If a
> user has a UTF-8 locale, then the OS driver will perform the
> conversion
> implicitly...
>
That is definitely a good thing. Although, those filesystems will have another problem. They will actually prevent you from changing your locale in some cases. Namely when there will be references to non-ASCII filenames in other files.
But the question here is, how quickly will they catch on? Will users really upgrade or just use the new ones and the old ones side by side? Will they be available for all UNIX flavors? There are systems out there that don't follow the industry. But just won't die out. They are typically used in environments where stable, proven solutions are very valuable. Like banking software.
And, if I would decide to upgrade my filesystem to such Unicode filesystem, I would definitely want an option to upgrade without converting everything to a single encoding beforehand. And not by using the U+FFFD. How about a simple, reliable escaping technique? Preferably standardized.
Lars
