On Jan 16, 2008, at 11:46 AM, Jakub Narebski wrote:There's two different ways to do filesystem encodings. One is to have =20= the fs simply not care about encoding, which is what the linux world =20 seems to prefer. Sure, this is great in that what you create the file =20= with is what you get back, but on the other hand, given an arbitrary =20 non-ASCII file on disk, you have absolutely no idea what the encoding =20= should be and you can't display it without making assumptions (yes you =20= can use heuristics, but you're still making assumptions). Filesystems =20= like HFS+ that standardize the encoding, on the other hand, make it =20 such that you always know what the encoding of a file should be, so =20 you can always display and use the filename intelligently. It also =20 means it plays much nicer in a non-ASCII world, since you don't have =20 to worry about different normalizations of a given string referring to =20= different files (it's one thing to be case-sensitive, but claiming =20 that "f=F6o" and "f=F6o" are different files just because one uses a =20 composed character and the other doesn't is extremely user-=20 unfriendly). On the other hand, what you create the file with may not =20= be what you read back later, since the name has been standardized. =20 It's hard to say one is better than the other, they're just different =20= ways of doing it. However, I have noticed that everybody who's voiced =20= an opinion on this list in favor of the encoding-agnostic approach =20 seem to be unwilling to accept that any other approach might have =20 validity, to the extent of calling an OS/filesystem that does things =20 different stupid or insane. This strikes me as extremely elitist and =20 risks alienating what I expect to be a fast-growing group of users =20 (i.e. OS X users). I'm willing to give Linus a free pass on calling other OS's stupid and =20= insane, as I don't think Linux would exist as it does today without =20 his strong opinions, but I don't think this should give carte blanche =20= to the rest of the community for this inflammatory behavior. I should note that I'm only taking the time to discuss this because, =20 despite the fact that I'm new to git, I really like it and I want it =20 to work better. And one area that it has a problem with is the de-=20 facto filesystem on my OS of choice. However, attempts to discuss the =20= problem invariable end up with multiple people calling my OS stupid =20 and insane simply because it differs in a particular design decision. =20= This is not a good way to build a community or to build a better =20 product, and I hope it can be improved. -Kevin Ballard --=20 Kevin Ballard http://kevin.sb.org kevin@sb.org http://www.tildesoft.com
| Greg Kroah-Hartman | [PATCH 002/196] Chinese: rephrase English introduction in HOWTO |
| Kok, Auke | Re: Linux 2.6.21-rc1 |
| Greg KH | Re: Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3 |
| Jeff Garzik | Re: [Patch v2] Make PCI extended config space (MMCONFIG) a driver opt-in |
git: | |
| David Miller | [GIT]: Networking |
| Gerrit Renker | [PATCH 15/37] dccp: Set per-connection CCIDs via socket options |
| Jarek Poplawski | [PATCH] pkt_sched: Destroy gen estimators under rtnl_lock(). |
| Eric Dumazet | [PATCH] net: remove superfluous call to synchronize_net() |
