Subject: Re: [nfsv4] Re: charsets

From: Jim Rees <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 13:47:45 -0500

Realistically, our server can't expect to know how any given filename
  was encoded.  Absent such knowledge, I assume there's no way we can
  reliably perform a conversion to UTF-8.

The server admin might know, and the server could have some sort of knob
that allows the admin to specify the charset in use on a particular exported
file system.

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From: "J. Bruce Fields" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 14:26:08 -0500

> that allows the admin to specify the charset in use on a particular exported

We'd still have to decide what to do in the case of nfsd exporting a
filesystem that knows nothing about UTF-8 and that is also accessed by
applications that know nothing about UTF-8.  In fact, that's probably
the common case on Linux, isn't it?

So we need to add an export option to declare the export as being in a
certain charset, then just error out somehow when encountering
filesystems that turn out not to be?  (What's the readdir error for "I'm
not able to tell you the name of that file"?)

Sorry, I know there've been long threads on the subject of UTF-8 in the
past.  Fell free to tell me if this discussion is just rehashing them.

--b.

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From: Trond Myklebust <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 11:50:58 -0800

> that allows the admin to specify the charset in use on a particular exported

Charsets are specified by users, not by admins in UNIX systems. If the
user on a client (or the server) chooses a bad charset, then tough
cookie: they are going to have problems.

This is the whole reason why Linux does no normalization or checking
whatsoever at the VFS level in order to enforce UTF-8 (despite Linus'
official position that only UTF-8 is guaranteed to be supported by the
filesystems).

Cheers,
  Trond

-- 
Trond Myklebust <[email-masked]>