cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C

Re:cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C by ok123456 on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @12:14PM (#36228860)

Then what happens when you mount it with the utf-8 option on one machine, and without it on another. The one without the utf-8 options writes a filename that breaks utf-8 encoding. You then try to mount it again with the utf-8 option. What happens then?

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Re:cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C by gpderetta on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @12:27PM (#36229107)

Not only mount. What happens when you unpack an archive that uses non-fully utf-8 compliant names. Or checkout the history of a git repo with non-utf-8 filenames. Network filesystems are also a source of pain.

And even if you settle for utf-8 you'll still have to deal with differences with filesystems automatically canonicalizing names or being case insensitive.

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Re:cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C by patrec on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @01:38PM (#36230276)

> What happens when you unpack an archive that uses non-fully utf-8 compliant names.

Exactly what you would want to happen (this is the actual error message you will get, BTW)?

   > (cd /mnt/funkyfilesystem && touch $'\370' && tar cf my-bad-file.tar $'\370')
   > tar x /mnt/funkyfilesystem/my-bad-file.tar
   tar: \370: Cannot open: Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character
   tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Or are you trying to tell me that your life isn't complete without tar or a git checkout silently dropping some nonsense byte sequences into your filesystem?

> And even if you settle for utf-8 you'll still have to deal with differences with filesystems automatically canonicalizing names or being case insensitive.

(Case-preserving you mean? I think truly case-insensitive died with 8.3 DOS filenames). These are also annoying, but a much more minor issue, e.g. you don't need to create a new weird string type just because of them.

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Re:cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C by gpderetta on Thursday June 08, 2023 @04:22AM (#36238798)

Your tar example appear to Work On My Machine. Probably I don't have a funky enough filesystem. Of course if the filesystem itself doesn't support invalid unicode names, there isn't much the os or tools can do.

But hey, if enough tools and applications stop supporting non-utf-8 names, it is possible that in a a few decades you might get what you want as de-facto non-utf8 files will just disappear.

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Re:cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C by patrec on Wednesday June 07, 2023 @01:21PM (#36229961)

I agree it's something that needs to be dealt with, but an you name a plausible scenario in which this would actually happen and in which the desired behavior would be that you get silently some garbage filename written to your disk?

Let's say you get an EILSEQ on accessing the dirent with readdir and now have to debug how you got some corrupted filename you clearly didn't want in the first place, remount and fix it. How is that worse than having the corrupted filename and not knowing about it before something more insidious happens?

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