Re: A Great Idea (tm) about reimplementing NLS.

[Alexey Zaytsev]

On 13/06/05, Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > The main idea of VFS is that you can access your files in the same way
> > on any supported file system. But actually you can't simple access
> > different-encoded non-ascii files on a filesystem that has no NLS,
> > like ext or reiser.
> 
> I don't think that any filesystem knows about the encoding of every
> filename - after all it is up to the user which encoding he uses for a
> given file (and no, no one forces me to use the same encoding on the
> names of all of "mine" files).
> IOW given a FAT filesystem on an USB stick, which codepage should be
> used?
 
Yes, most if not all filesystems don't have any information about file
names encoding, but the user can often guess it. Hawing files with
differently-encoded names on the same filesystem is nonsense, which
could only appear because of the current NLS misfeatures.

> Perhaps it makes sense to start a prototype with a FUSE (or similar)
> module. You could use standard libs to convert without messing around in
> the kernel (and I don't think someone wants to have an encoding
> conversion layer in the kernel).

We already have it in the kernel, it's called nls and it's up to the
file system implementation to decide to use it or not. I don't
contrive something new, I just want the existing system to work a bit
different.
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