Re: Strange behaviour with dired and UTF8

[Richard Stallman]

    I don't exactly understand the Handa's proposal, so could someone
    explain to me how it handles a situation such as /<foo>/<bar>
    where <foo> is encoded in latin-1 and <bar> in utf-8 ?

If you literally mean that the absolute file name in the file system
consists of a Latin-1 part and a UTF-8 part, my first reaction would
have been "give up".  But it occurs to me that if Emacs decodes the
components one by one, it might be able to handle this case correctly
without too much work.

Re-encoding such names is more difficult.  I think the only possible method
is to record the proper coding system in text properties in the string.
We would have to make expand-file-name preserve these properties when
it makes sense; likewise other functions that operate on file names.

It adds up to a fair amount of work--not impossible, but perhaps
not worth the trouble.

    I mean, of course Emacs should do better than the rest of the crowd,
    but if most/all other applications fail miserably, then it's unlikely
    that people will use such setups and it would be wrong for Emacs to
    make it easier to create such a setup

I agree with that point.