MINOURA Makoto wrote:
> |> In <20041114021626.GA4414@unona.kuzminki.ru>
> |>  Vsevolod Stakhov <cebka@jet.msk.su> wrote:
> 
> 
>>but till nowadays there is no support for this. In freebsd, for example,
>>this ability appears in 2003 year, and I consider it very comfortable. 
>>So my question is why iconv interface didn't appear in NetBSD?
> 
> 
> IMHO multilingualization support of pathnames is not such
> easy; we support many kind of filesystems, including UFS
> family (on which we can happily use non-ascii pathnames
> since it leaves interpretation of them to the userland) and
> ISO9660 (which uses Unicode and currently we can use ascii
> only).  We need much more discussion of the framework before
> implementing a filesystem-specific pathname conversion
> support (I think Citrus guys have their opinions).
> 

But translation of characters can be made transparently. IMHO this 
doesn't broke vfs/vnode architecture, and all options, needed for 
character translation we can pass for example throught mount options. I 
think that character recoding can help to read any characters on any 
file system. This only require to port freebsd iconv engine to netbsd, 
and this won't be too difficult. Another problem is when we cannot 
convert unicode character to local charset. In this case we can use old 
behaviour placing `?' character.