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

[Lukasz Stelmach]

Patrick McFarland napisaÅ(a):
> On Wednesday 15 June 2005 04:26 am, Lukasz Stelmach wrote:
> 
>>MÃns RullgÃrd napisaÅ(a):
>>
>>>I use utf-8 exclusively for my filenames (the few that are not 7-bit
>>>ascii).  Forcing others who use the system to do the same would cause
>>>them a lot of trouble, as they must transfer files to and from Windows
>>>machines that use anything but utf-8.
>>
>>But VFAT (and NTFS???) use unicode, i.e. UTF-16 (???). AFAIK
> 
> No, VFAT and NTFS use an 8-bit encoding,

I meant that they don't use utf-8 but it is still the unicode. I am not
sure i've made myself clear.

> Forcing people to use unicode isn't a bad thing btw, especially since
> it is a culture agnostic encoding that can represent wide characters
> (eg. from Asian languages) in a uniform manner*, and allowing to use
> multiple languages (eg. Chinese and Japanese) at once without needing
> to switch encodings.

Yes. I also think UTF-8 is a good idea, however it is not an ideal one.
It *preferes* Roman encodings since some Asian characters need even four
bytes.

IMHO for *every* filesystem there need to be an *option* to:

1. store filenames in utf-8 (that is quite possible today) or any other
unicode form.
2. convert them to/from a desired iocharset. I prefere using ISO-8859-2
on my system for not every tool support utf-8 today (hopefuly yet).

Of course if a user whishes to store filenames in some other encoding
she should be *able* to do so (that is why i like linux).

Generally. IMHO VFAT is a good example how character encoding needs to
be handeled.

Best regards.
-- 
ByÅo mi bardzo miÅo.                    Trzecia pospolita klÄska, [...]
>Åukasz<                      JuÅ nie katolicka lecz zÅodziejska.  (c)PP

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature