On Sun, Dec 9, 2018 at 12:53 PM Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > As Ted mentioned the SMB case, in my understanding, we might have more > users for in-kernel ut8 normalization/casefold comparison functions than > just ext4 in the future. Crossed emails. See my note about how there really is not a single case-folding library. It's simply not physically possible, because there are so many different ideas about what case-folding actually means. That's still true even if "everything is utf-8", sadly. So how do you handle locale issues and things like "we have ten different tables for utf-8 comparisons, and that's _ignoring_ the issue of whether we combine or decompose characters"? And there's no way you can use the existing nls interfaces for upper/lower case, for example, since they are all limited to 256-byte tables and direct accesses to said tables, afaik. And if that is where the extensions were, and that is why you changed other filesystems, this all matters. My *guess* is that what you really want is not really about unicode at all, but specifically about just the NTFS rules. Which, yes, might find generic sharing interest between cifs/ext4/etc, but my gut feel is that they'd be specifically about some NTFS interoperability library. Because even then I think you might have issues like "NTFS-5.1" vs "NTFS-4.0" etc. Maybe you don't care, and you're picking just *one* version. And I haven't seen the code. Basically, I would not be surprised if the sanest model is simply to make a "ntfs" library. Because I'm really fairly sure that OS X rules are very different indeed, even if it too is "unicode". Linus