A filename is an identity and if identities are ambiguous, you run into trouble, examples in this thread abound.
Putting it another way, do you work with relational databases? Primary keys? Those are identities. I don't even want to think about a world in which I can't roundtrip data through a database and have things NOT come out the way I put them in. "Human labels" or not ;-)
Of course it's fine to search for things case-insensitively or otherwise normalized. And so we have "find -iname" and "locate -i" etc. etc. That's totally reasonable.
The fact that inhuman labels can sneak in stops me
> said no Linux user ever
You just weren't listening
> you run into trouble, examples in this thread abound
Bag of bytes approach is not trouble free
> Primary keys?
Do those accept any bytes in a bag?
> can't roundtrip data through a database and have things NOT come out the way I put them in
So you just want normalisation-preserving filesystem?
But I see that you care so little about human users that you think they should learn to avoid Á outside of letters to grandma...
Stops you from what? I'm not sure what you mean there. No one mentioned inhuman. Someone, not me, instantiated a "labels for humans" concept and I roll with that, for the sake of conversation.
>> Primary keys? > Do those accept any bytes in a bag?
Well, a "bag" (unordered) would not be the right term, but we understand what the original author meant (a bytestring), so: Yes, in fact they do. For instance, PostgreSQL:
create table bla (joyfulkey bytea PRIMARY KEY)
We don't want identifiers mangled. Should you be so unfortunate to have to use bytestrings as primary keys, then they'll come out the way you put them in. Because they're unambiguous identifiers. Not prose.
> So you just want normalisation-preserving filesystem?
I want an identity-preserving filesystem. And I have it!
> But I see that you care so little about human users that you think they should learn to avoid Á outside of letters to grandma...
I care a lot about human users. I give them nice file pickers so that they can easily choose to open files named ÁÁÁ.docx. Or search for those, using a system where both query and index is normalized (as is the common approach). And the other kind of users, also human, who find they care about the identity of files since they're writing that search engine and have to pass them in an argument vector to get the PDF viewer to open the file that the user found, will be most happy if they don't need to worry about the file system second-guessing them on identities.
PS There's a lot of you-this you-that ad-hominem things in your comments. That's not really the best way to hold a discussion.
But that worked in an OS that had no command line - UNIX users are allergic to binary configuration formats and demand to be able to type path names.
Historically, you configured your OS to match (what you thought was) the encoding used on your disk, but that starts to break when you have network disks or when users exchange floppies.
In practice, I think about every Unix/Linux file system at least assumes ASCII encoding for the printable ASCII range. How else does, for example, your shell find “ls” on your disk when you type those characters?
So, not even in Unix/Linux is a file name “a bag of bytes”
I think file systems should enforce an encoding, and provide a way for users of the file system to find out what it is.
Apple’s HFS, for example, stored explicit ‘code page’ ID so that the Finder knew, for example, to use the Apple Cyrillic encoding to interpret the bytes describing file names on disk for that disk.
The modern way is to just say file names are valid Unicode strings, with UTF-8 being the popular choice. Unfortunately that introduces the normalization problem.
As you say, it can just show the sequence of bytes (plus some visual hints that they are escaped). It is not like nonsensical filenames with seem composed of random numbers are uncommon (e.g. look into your .git dir)
> How else does, for example, your shell find “ls” on your disk when you type those characters?
This is purely a presentation layer issue. The filesystem assumes nothing.
What you're suggesting would mean that a Korean user saving a file on their desktop and naming it in Korean would in turn see the filename turn into garbage, which, I hope we can all agree, is not a reasonable suggestion.
Creating 2 different systems carries risks: it has a learning curve, a support cost, and breaks everything that came before.
Perhaps, in a utopian green field, we redo a systems language, a portable systems API, and a common operating system with a compatibility layer to the old way on top.
Not changing impacts many more users (all the future billions) and costs even more: the learning/support/etc. is all there, and it's harder to learn about a buggy system since you have more papercuts
Also, it doesn't break everything, we're not living in a dystopia
2) Change what to what? There are multiple filesystems systems (and OSs) with different and sometimes incompatible filename encodings. Who picks the winner?
3) There is irony on dropping backward compat and requiring UTF-8, an econding whose claim to fame is backward compatibility with ASCII based systems (and not coincidentally was designed by UNIX Elder Ones)
1) so? That will be true for anything
2) sequence of bytes to human encoding. Who picked the loser??? This would similarly be some unidentifiable group of people. You can start by picking the winner for yourself, even at a conceptual level
3) no irony, sequence of bytes is not ASCII
The filesystem shouldn't arbitrate localization issues. It's the wrong place to do it in terms of performance, area-of-responsibility, and portability.
NUL-terminated UTF-8 in memory and size+data on disk is the best encoding.
Normalization is a multifaceted problem that needs to be handled at or before where the filename argument hits the standard library. Sometimes, normalization is NOT desirable and it is preferrable to normalize for comparison only to other strings and to faithfully store whatever was provided verbatim.
Side-effects and doing 737 MAX MCAS underneath users is the road to ruin.
Command line argument is treated as (unicode) string, and file name are (sometimes) treated as bag of byte .....
Czech language has Á, Č, Ď, Ě, É, Í, Ň, Ó, Ř, Š, Ť, Ů, Ú, Ý
Á can be represented in Unicode by its spesific codepoint, or can be made up of two - Letter A and the squiggly bit.
So when a user tries to fOpen a file called ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
Should by application make 2^32 requests to the file systen to open a file for every possible combination of bytes this steing could be represented as?
Still not great.
I'm aware of the normalization problem, but that should be handled in the API layers above the filesystem. In which layer exactly is up for discussion though (but IMHO there should always be a fallback to access files via their "raw bytes path identifiers", if for nothing else than debugging).
The main ways of finding files are by enumeration and filtering on that enumeration. Normalization should selectively occur during filtering rather than permanently destroying the original bytes of the name of the file. Without a binary-precise filename call to open() (fopen() is a library call, not a syscall), then case-folding and Unicode normalization shouldn't second-guess the request or help the program. Case-insensitive filesystems are industry nonstandard and a dumb choice Apple continues to use.
"But that's subjecting the user to limitations of the system!" you might object, and while you'd be right we should also ponder whether a filesystem is a word processor or a system for locating data using filenames as identifiers, and consequently, what sound handling of identifiers is.
And let's be realistic. Most users will choose the file to open from a file picker dialog. fopen() is not their interface, their interface is a file picker.
The intersection of people for whom fopen() is their interface (no file pickers) but for whom learning lessons on the value of using unambiguous identifiers is somehow out of reach, would be exceedingly small.
The unambiguously encoded filenames wouldn't be in the natural language of the user, so you're asking the user to learn another language. Users shouldn't have to learn another language to use the computer.
For prose of course it wouldn't be acceptable if you can't use your full language, but this is a filesystem, and we're talking identifiers, not prose. We accept that for a wide range of everyday things — I don't think many people are getting worked up about web forms not accepting their phone numbers when entered in Latin numerals.
Using bytestring labels sans normalization is just the rational choice, and actually quite accommodating. People _can_ use their natural language. If you can encode your prose in bytes, then there you go, that'll be your filename ;-) and if you can't remember what diacritic-combining strategy you used when you created the file, and can't manage to fopen() it anymore by typing out the filename, use a file picker or search. And then, perhaps, go "that was a hassle, I'll avoid those fu͝n͜n͏y͝ sq̧u͜igg̶l̢įȩş for my next filename, computer are stupid" - not the end of the world, not the worst outcome.
Then there is Vietnamese which has a lot of accents and other diacritics. Not sure how much you can do without them.
Perhaps a language like Chinese doesn't have so many ambiguities, as in there is only one way to encode a given character in Unicode?
UNICODE details like normalization can be handled up in the application layer.