GNU bug report logs - #26353
GuixSD /tmp cleaner fails to clean when Umlauts like "ä" are used in filenames

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From: ludo <at> gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)
To: Danny Milosavljevic <dannym <at> scratchpost.org>
Cc: 26353 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#26353: VFS name encoding
Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2017 13:28:27 +0200

Hi Danny,

Danny Milosavljevic <dannym <at> scratchpost.org> skribis:

>> The problem of how to deal with file name encoding has been
>> discussed on the Guile side so hopefully the next release in the 2.2
>> series will have a solution for this.
>
> For what it's worth, I think the sane solution is the Plan 9 solution:
> Just represent file names as bytevectors.  Programs which don't care
> about the actual name - for example programs that just want to do
> (for-each unlink (scandir (string->utf8 "."))) or something - have no
> reason to care about the encoding at all.  And then use UTF-8 encoding
> everywhere (for the file names, also for everything else) throughout
> the operating system for the tools that do care.

FWIW the problem has been discussed at length in Guile land, although I
don’t think anyone has come up with a complete solution yet.

I think it’s natural to represent file names as strings, but we made a
mistake in 2.0 when we assumed we’d basically always be able to decode
file names using the current locale “on sane systems”.  So now we need a
way to represent file names that cannot be decoded while preserving
backward compatibility.

To be continued!

Ludo’.

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