Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Please don't unless you've thoroughly tested in multiple cultures. Unicode is broken for Japanese; on some systems it's possible to change a setting to make it broken for Chinese instead, but the only non-theoretical way to make a program that can list a directory full of Japanese filenames and a directory full of Chinese filenames correctly is to have that program be encoding-aware.


I'm curious, what does 'broken' mean? Is this about the CJK merger, or something else?


Yes, CJK unification. Characters will be rendered differently from how they should be (e.g. with missing or extra strokes).


Why is that a filesystem issue or a "utf8only=on" issue? If the renderer doesn't have sufficient context, it will pick one glyph to render anyway, and it could be "wrong".

PS: unless your take is to say that we should just assume everything is ascii and don't ever render codepoints > 127?


If the filesystem can't allow parts to be in different encodings then it can't ever possibly work right. With current filesystems at least I can do "ls ~/chinese-files; LANG=ja_JP.SJIS ls ~/japanese-files". Which is not a great way of working, but it's better than a utf8only filesystem where it's physically impossible to make even that much work.


If you run a ZFS file system where this is a huge deal to you, then don't set utf8only. If it's set on a parent dataset, then explicitly do utf8only=off.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2027 batch! Applications are open till November 2.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: