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

From: Lukasz Stelmach
Date: Wed Jun 15 2005 - 18:36:22 EST


Lennart Sorensen napisaÅ(a):

>>And it is good in a way, however, i think kernel level translation
>>should be also possible. Either done by a code in each filsystem or by
>>some layer above it.
>
> What do you do if the underlying filesystem can not store some unicode
> characters that are allowed on others?

That's why UTF-8 is suggested. UTF-8 has been developed to "fool" the
software that need not to be aware of unicodeness of the text it manages
to handle it without any hickups *and* to store in the text information
about multibyte characters.What characters exactly you do mean? NULL?
There is no NULL byte in any UTF-8 string except the one which
terminates it.

> VFAT uses unicode? I thought it used the same codepage silyness as FAT
> did, since after all ti was just supposed to be a long filename
> extension to FAT. Do they use unicode in the long filenames only?

Yes, it uses unicode. And dos codepages in short ones. To prove this
take a vfat floppy and mount it. touch(1) a file on it that has some
non latin1 characters. Unmount the floppy then do dd if=/dev/fd0
of=/tmp/floppy bs=1024 count=512. While it's done take some hex
editor/viewer and seek the latin1-complaint part of the filename
in the floppy file (search for uppercase string). Righ above the short
filename you'll find multibyte long one.

> I think UDF is a better filesystem for many types of media since it is
> able to me more gently to the sectors storing the meta data than VFAT
> ever will be.

I've tried cd packet writing with UDF and it gives insane overhead of
about 20%. What metadata you'd like to store for example on your
flashdrive or a floppy disk?

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

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