Message-ID: <3ED361C7.5080601@wgate.com>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 09:01:59 -0400
From: Michael Sinz <msinz@wgate.com>
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To: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
CC: linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: Tomorrow
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Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 06:58:08AM -0400, Michael Sinz wrote:
> 
>>When we did this for the Amiga (oh so many years ago) it was a royal
>>PITA.  We ended up punting for the most part on anything that was
>>outside of the ISO-Latin-1 code page and even there we had a problem
>>due to some "differences" of opinion by certain language groups what
>>was supposed to happen.
> 
> I wrote a C Library for the Amiga a long time ago and in the end I 
> left it all for locale.library because it was too nasty to do by itself.

That is why we wrote the locale.library - it was nasty.
Even worse when you add in the sorting issues.

>>This gets worse when you look at behavior patterns due to the fact that
>>a file, especially one accessed over the network, may be accessed by
>>a machine with different locale settings and thus have slightly different
>>rules as to what is the lowercase form of an uppercase letter or wordform.
> 
> AFAIk the SMB protocol handles this. 

I would have to look at how it deals with uniqueness vs non-uniqueness
between different clients.  That was the really hard problem for us.

>>there was some new agreement such that case conversion for all locales
>>are consistant with eachother)
> 
> Yes there is: Unicode/UTF-8. That is where all the Linux distributions are 
> going too. For legacy SMB support you will still need to support codepages,
> but that could be done by samba. For XFS I guess it would be enough to just
> support UTF-8. Supporting different code pages is probably not too useful
> anymore.

Does UNICODE actually define the case-ness of characters now?  I
have been out of UNICODE stuff for some time (working at different
levels of system design - not the OS guru I used to be :-()

It used to just define the glyphs and give not symantic meaning to
them.  In fact, the 16-bit UNICODE had the problem of not even
keeping all of the glyphs for a locale together.  It was just a
way of enumerating glyphs and some "compatibility" stuff for
ASCII and ECMA/ISO Latin-1

-- 
Michael Sinz -- Director, Systems Engineering -- Worldgate Communications
A master's secrets are only as good as
	the master's ability to explain them to others.