Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Increasing the filename space (Or: begging for trouble?)

[Aaron Bentley]

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 12:08, Tom Lord wrote:

> Perhaps.
> 
> I think the current situation is close to right:  log files must use
> an octet-based encoding with ASCII as a subset.   Headers added by tla
> itself are purely ASCII.
>
> A content-encoding header would be handy for output commands (e.g.,
> `cat-log') and in browsers.  Given a log file with an encoding header,
> and a desired output encoding, it's (mostly) a simple matter to read
> the log, _perhaps_ unescape the tla-generated headers, and transcode
> to the desired output format.

I'm tempted to think that we should enforce utf-8 for log-files, so as
to standardize the format.  The committer machine should know how to
turn the local encoding into utf-8, and the getter machine should know
how to turn utf-8 into the local encoding.  But I'm not sure if we
should assume that the getter machine can turn the committer's local
encoding into utf-8.

Another benefit of enforcing utf-8: it would be possible to use Unicode
characters in headers, if that was ever considered desirable.  For
example, it might be valuable to allow Unicode in the Creator name.

We'd probably want to provide a way for tla to convert the log into
utf-8 if we were going to require utf-8.

Aaron
-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.