UTF-8 and filenames

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 22:57 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> 
> The tools that we're building (package database, koji, etc) currently
> assume that we'll only encounter UTF-8 filenames.  We've found at least
> one package (aspell-is) which currently has a non-UTF-8 filename so we
> want to decide if these cases should be considered packaging bugs or if
> we need to build some sort of support for this into our tools.  Does
> this need to be a packaging guideline?  Perhaps not but where else does
> it fit?  We could tuck it in as one of the things rpmlint reports and
> not list it explicitly but it is something that we are going to always
> want fixed (whereas we allow people to dispute many of the other errors
> and warnings reported by rpmlint.)
> 

While in practise 99.9% of all filenames will be UTF-8 or even ASCII,
it seems misguided to let tools make assumptions about that. The only
assumption that can be safely made is that '/' and '\0' don't occur
inside the byte sequence that makes up a filename...