cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C

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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