On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 10:41 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote: > Adam Olsen wrote: >> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 6:55 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote: >>> Unfortunately, even programmers experienced in I18N like Martin, and >>> those with intuition-that-has-the-force-of-law<wink> like Guido, >>> express deliberate disbelief on this point. They say that filesystem >>> names and environment variable values are text, which is true from the >>> semantic viewpoint but can't be fully supported by any implementation. >> >> With all the focus on backup tools and file managers I think we've >> lost perspective. They're an important use case, but hardly the >> dominant one. >> >> Please, as a user, if your app is creating new files, do NOT use >> bytes! You have no excuse for creating garbage, and garbage doesn't >> help the user any. Getting the encoding right, use the unicode APIs, >> and don't pass the buck on to everything else. >> > Uhmmm.... That's good advice but doesn't solve any problems :-(. No > matter what I create, the filenames will be bytes when the next person > reads them in. If my locale is shift-js and the person I'm sharing the > file with uses utf-8 things won't work. Even if my locale is utf-8 > (since I come from a European nation) and their locale is utf-16 > (because they're from an Asian nation) the Unicode API won't work. So you'll open up the dir and find this collection: ??????.txt ????????.png ???????.html ????????.html ???.png ??????.txt ??????.txt ??????.txt A half-broken setup is still a broken setup. Eventually you have to tell people to stop screwing around and pick one encoding. I doubt that UTF-16 is used very much (other than on windows). I haven't found any statistics on what distros use, but did find this one of the web itself: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/moving-to-unicode-51.html I can't wait for next year's statistics. -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus
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