On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Robin Rosenberg wrote: > torsdagen den 17 januari 2008 skrev Linus Torvalds: > > And yes, I also realize that it's not going to be realistic. We're > > probably *closer* to that than we used to be, but I don't think you can > > even make Windows think FAT is UTF-8. > > It's UTF-16 (when needed). I think it's all in the Linux kernel for you > to see. .. well, FAT certainly wasn't. But yes, VFAT probably is. Not that I want to look at it ;) > > translation to UTF-8, and since we use C strings, I'd assume/hope Windows > > actually uses that unambiguous translation for any filenames). > > It uses the local 8-bit codepage, which is not UTF-8, often some latin-inspired > thingy, but in Asia multi-byte encodings are used. In western Europe it is > Windows-1252, which is almost, but not exactly iso-8859-1. Oh, and then we > have the cmd prompt which has another encoding in 8-bit mode. Well, if it uses a 8-bit codepage, then that means that as far as the POSIX filename interface is concerned, it has nothing what-so-ever to do with Unicode (ie unicode is just a totally invisible internal encoding issue, not externally visible). I assume you have to use some insane Windows-only UCS-2 filename function to actually see any Unicode behaviour. Sad. Because there really is no reason to use a local 8-bit codepage when you could just use UTF-8. > I think there is a cygwin patch that converts to and from UTF-8. An application > can choose to use the "A" or "W" interfaces. The W-API's are the real ones and > the others' are just wrappers that convert to and from UTF-16 before anything > happens (i.e. CreateFileA is slower than CreateFileW and so on). So the CreateFileW() is the "native UTF-16 interface", and CreateFileA() is the 8-bit codepage one that has nothing to do with Unicode and is purely some local thing. But for a UNIX interface layer, the most logical thing would probably be to map "open()" and friends not to CreateFileA(), but to CreateFileW(utf8_to_utf16(filename)). Once you do that, then it sounds like Windows would basically be Unicode, and hopefully without any crazy normalization (but presumably all the crazy case-insensitivity cannot be fixed ;^). So it probably really only depends on whether you choose to use the insane 8-bit code page translation or whether you just use a sane and trivial UTF8<->UTF16 conversion. Anybody know which one cygwin/mingw does? Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
