[Bug 1632] [PATCH] UTF-8 hint sftp-server extension

[bugzilla-daemon at bugzilla.mindrot.org]

https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1632

--- Comment #5 from Damien Miller <djm at mindrot.org> 2010-01-07 15:56:15 EST ---
I'm not sure what problem this patch solves - I suppose it is
technically possible for platforms that OpenSSH runs on to use a
non-UTF8 encoding, but in does anyone really do it in practice? (I
don't know)

>From a client perspective UTF-8 should be quite easily distinguished
from other non-ASCII encodings by looking at the first character
sequence with the high bit set.

Some other questions:

Is it really the filesystem that encodes filenames as UTF-8? or is it a
convention used by application developers using the filesystem?

If is is the filesystem itself, then shouldn't it be detectable via a
mount option so we don't need the commandline flag.

Perhaps it would be better to just ensure that we always render
filenames in UTF-8, but really sftp-server has no way of knowing what
encoding has been used and since Unix filesystems have traditionally
been pretty agnostic about the structure of filenames (other than to
exclude '\0' and '/') they may be entirely unstructured or have
multiple encodings active on the same filesystem. I'm not sure what the
answer is, but I'm reluctant to add a protocol extension that we will
have to honour perpetually without understanding it better.

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