[ please Cc: me in replies ]
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 10:59:57 +0000, der Mouse wrote:

>> It seems that all gtk2+ using applications (and this is a large
>> number of applications) are supposed to assume that all path names
>> are in UTF-8.
> 
> That seems rather severely broken, for any application that reads
> filenames from the filesystem, since a lot of them will be used on
> filesystems (like current NetBSD with ffs) that *are*
> encoding-agnostic.  What are they supposed to do upon encountering a

They are supposed to be used on encoding-agnostic filesystems - linux
filesystems are not different in this respect. I do not see anything wrong
with it - even if the filesystem is encoding-agnostic, the filenames are
encoded somehow, so all applications should agree on a common convention,
and UTF-8 was considered the best choice for such convention.

> pathname component containing an octet sequence which is not
UTF-8? I
> can't think of _any_ action which isn't wrong in a substantial fraction
> of the cases.

Either you don't have such filenames in your filesystem, and the situation
you describe can occur only as a result of user error, or you have them,
in that case you don't want to use UTF-8 for filenames at all, so you
define the appropriate environment variables - see the documentation
mentioned in my previous post. (Having some filenames in UTF-8 and others
not does not make much sense, as you can't tell the encoding for a
particular filename.)

Bye	Pavel