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

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 04:52:00PM +0200, Lukasz Stelmach wrote:
> There are far more programmes than only iconv. First of all readline
> library is kind of broken because it counts (or at least it did a year
> ago) bytes instead of characters. I won't use UTF-8 nor force anybody
> else to do so until readline will handle it properly.

Well utf8 would sure be nice if everything used it, and getting nice
fonts for it was simple.

> 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?

> It depend's on what it is used for. It is very good fs for removable
> media. None of linux native filesystems is good for this because of
> different uids on different machines. Since VFAT uses unicode it is
> possible to see the filenames properly on systems using different
> codepages for the same language (1:1 is possible).

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?

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.

Len Sorensen