Subject: Re: codeconv v3 - kernel code set recoding engine
To: Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com>
From: Jaromir Dolecek <dolecek@ics.muni.cz>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/03/2000 14:20:45
Greywolf wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Jaromir Dolecek wrote:
> At the risk of sounding heretic, I'm wondering why the *ix crowd
> has stuck with 8-bit characters for paths, and for how long is it
> going to be the "standard"?

~forewer, I think, since it's POSIX.

> It certainly makes for some complication
> to have to support two branches of a kernel (one for 8-bit, one for
> 16-bit pathnames) if, as I have seen before in another incarnation,
> one needs to support a non-western language.

The problem is, that 16bit codes are not enough for some languages
as well. It's probably wiser just to pass the filenames in some
"safe" form and those programs whose are aware would do whatever
appropriate, while those not aware would still continue to work.

Much more complicated issue are locales. I'm not fortunately
trying to solve that :)

Jaromir
-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>      http://www.ics.muni.cz/~dolecek/
@@@@  Wanna a real operating system ? Go and get NetBSD, damn!  @@@@