Re: normalizing filenames and strings

[Xavier Bestel <xavier bestel free fr>]

Le mercredi 28 mars 2007 à 11:50 -0500, Shaun McCance a écrit :
> Most applications that operate on files will accept file name
> arguments when invoked.  What are we supposed to do with these?

I don't know, I always use bash completion, which should avoid the need
to use canonical-encoding - except, of course, in the example which
started this thread (1st char is the problematic one). Well, copy/paste
to the shell should solve that.
IMHO this is more a bash problem than a GNOME problem: it will happen
with /bin/rm too.

> Bear in mind that the argument isn't only used by shell junkies.
> It's also used when, for example, you double-click a JPG to open
> EOG.  Nautilus passes the file name to EOG.

In the nautilus-to-eog case, there should be no problem because the
filename shouldn't be touched in between, be it normalized or not.

> If we don't normalize, users might have a hard time opening
> files from the command line.

Sure.

> If we do normalize, then people will pretty much never be able
> to open files that have unnormalized file names, which seems
> like a much more serious problem. 

Not if fileselectors autocomplete correctly: they are currently
more-or-less case-insensitive, they just have to become
utf8-flavor-insensitive.

	Xav