[Development] The life of a file name and other possibly mal-encoded strings on non-Windows systems

[Thiago Macieira]

On Thursday 09 October 2014 01:57:05 Marc Mutz wrote:
> The value lies _also_ in being able to iterate over "weird" filenames
> (where  weird simply means plugging in a USB stick into an otherwise
> UTF-8-only system).

Mind you these two facts:
* USB mass-storage devices came into being after Linux switched to UTF-8
* The number of USB flash drives with Unix filesystems is incredibly small

That means the number of USB flash drives containing Unix filesystems that 
aren't UTF-8 encoded will be effectively zero.

VFAT doesn't count, since it stores the file names as UTF-16. If you're not 
getting the right file names, your system is misconfigured.

The only one that poses trouble are ISO-9660 CD-ROMs that have Rock Ridge 
extensions for Unix attributes and longer file names. Do people still have CD 
drives?

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center