Hello! I'm not sure the developers mailing list is a right place for philosophical discussions - it's more about features, bugs and patches. But anyway I have an important for me topic I want to talk about. Limits of the ext4 file are really huge, I just can't imagine 1 EiB disk array, it's out of my mind's bounds. Maximum file size is quite big too. But there is one limitation looking tiny against these Tera- and Exbi-bytes: maximum filename length is 255 bytes. Is 255 characters enough? I think it's enough for the vast majority of users. But there is one problem: 255 bytes and 255 characters are no longer equal. Multibyte encodings are spreading fast and it should be taken into account. For a long time I was using the simple koi8-r encoding and it was enough. Even when my favorite debian distribution moved to utf8 I was still keeping it. Even when I discovered that gtk and qt application always use utf8 and every io-operation causes conversions I was using koi8. But when I found out that the first thing gcc does with the source code is converting it to utf8 I thought that it is really the time to move ahead. I was full of optimism converting my file systems to utf8 but I discovered that my book collection can not be stored correctly due to the 127 characters filename length limitation. Actually I'm lucky having only two bytes per character, utf8-character can contain up to 4 bytes which reduces the limit to 63 characters. Really I see no reasons for keeping such a terrible limitation. Ext4 branch was created because there were to many things to change compared to ext3. And it's very sad that such a simple improvement was forgotten :( Alexey -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
