Bug#217261: galeon: browsing unicode filenames doesn't appear.

Sven Luther Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>, 217261@bugs.debian.org
Mon, 29 Dec 2003 21:10:55 +0100


On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 09:00:13PM +0100, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> 
> > Yeah, sure, brain dead choice, at least until debian officially supports
> > a full UTF-8 desktop, which it currently does not.
> 
> Brain dead choice ? I don't think so, UTF-8 choice is an upstream choice
> to a technical problem ... do you know a solution to manage differents
> locales in a proper way ? 
> BTW the Gnome desktop is UTF-8 ready.

Well, for debian it is. Currently debian is not UTF-8 ready, and until
we make sure it is, breaking non-UTF-8 setups is a bad choice. And no,
there is no commitment from the debian project to have full UTF-8
support.

> > Ah, yes.
> >
> > But then, how will it work out, if i have UTF-8 filesystems on my box,
> > and the CD has something else ?
> 
> Yes, just set G_BROKEN_FILENAME (again)

And i should set it and unset it each time i insert a CD-ROM that
happens to use non UTF-8 CDROMs ? I think it may be ok for me, but for
joe lambda user, i doubt this will do.

Also, imagine the problem with using older CDs from before UTF-8 existed
for example.

> > And having files simply disapear is worse yet. Also, i seriously don't
> > believe that there is no sane way around this, just displaying a ? like
> > many apps do or something such, should be ok, no ? This is typically a
> > decision made by 7bit locale users who don't care.
> 
> No, that's a technical solution ... support of multi-locales is not
> possible. Just set G_BROKEN_FILENAME, you'll have iso-8859-15 encoding
> files ok and UTF-8 one with some A@ instead of broken encoding (instead
> of your "?" ... is it really such a big difference ?)

Ah, ok, this makes sense. Still, this is a hindrance to having people
switch to UTF-8 per default. If everybody is forced to set
G_BROKEN_FILENAME then more files will get created which are non UTF-8
and the problem will get worse.

> > default, but just making the files vanish is bad, and definitively a
> > bug, which hopefully should be fixed.
> 
> G_BROKEN_FILENAME exists, the "broken" part of the name is not really
> clear, should rather be named G_COMPAT_MODE or something like that, but
> works ...

But it would be nice to know that the file does exist. Or else you would
enter a CD, not even knowing about the problem. Some way of setting this
dynamically would be nice. Or, some way of just listing those broken
filenames in some way.

> > Mmm, probably will never happen, so let's keep this open until debian is
> > ready to go to a full UTF-8 system, which it clearly is not yet.
> 
> Ok, so I'll tag it as a wontfix.

Fine with me.

That said, it isn't really a galeon problem, but a generic gnome stuff.
I wonder if it would be nice to reassign it to the gnome library
packages or something such ? Or discuss this on the gnome mailing lists ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther