UTF-8 and filenames

[Simo Sorce]

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?

Absolutely, we MUST be consistent.

>From a Samba POV for example we can certainly cope with different
charsets, but 1 at a time, there is NO way for samba to successfully
present files to other hosts if there are files with mixed chrasets.

And consistency in a distro is what everybody expects, I think it make
absolutely no sense to permit anything but utf8 in today packages.\

Simo.