UTF-8 and filenames

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 20:26 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm thinking of writing a draft guideline for the packaging committee to
> mandate all filenames be in utf-8.  Theoretically, I think this is the
> right thing to do as :
> 
> 1) UTF8 is the native encoding of our filesystems
> 2) UTF8 is what the distro as a whole has migrated to
> 3) There's no encoding information stored with the filename so having
> filenames in arbitrary encodings is a recipe for disaster.
> 
> Since I am not an expert in i18n issues I'm posting for some feedback
> here first.  What do people think?  Is this the right thing to do?  Are
> there some prominent examples of where this is wrong?
> 

It is certainly the right thing to do, but I have to wonder how relevant
this is. Apart from the newly introduced translated directory names in
xdg-user-dirs, I can't think of any examples of non-ASCII filenames in
packages...

Matthias