Re: filename encoding (CDROM)

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andries.Brouwer@xxxxxx wrote on 2001-02-02 13:14 UTC:
> > The commonly used implementation level of ISO 9660
> > restricts filenames to a 8.3 format and the ASCII subset [A-Z0-9_]
> 
> Seems you forgot about Rockridge and Joliet.

These are just pre-ISO 13346/UDF hacks not really worth mentioning any
more. Will hopefully die out soon. Aren't used on DVD fortunately. ISO
13346 is really much much better than ISO 9660. Long Unicode filenames,
suitable for read/write media, capable of coexisting with ISO 9660 file
structure information for backwards compatibility.

If people had a bit of imagination, they would start using ISO 13346 (=
ECMA-167) also on floppy disks and we would finally have a proper
international floppy disk standard format. Unfortunately, Redmond
decided to go for hacks such as Joliet and VFAT instead.

> > It is the job of a CD/DVD ROM driver to map file names to the preferred
> > file encoding on a system
> 
> No, that is not the common case under Linux.

Not yet. At the moment, everyone still either restricts filenames to
ASCII or uses the Rockridge hack to add long filenames to ISO 9660 with
8.3 names in some unspecified character encoding.

The proper standards are already available, people just have to start
using them:

ftp://ftp.ecma.ch/ecma-st/Ecma-167.pdf
http://www2.osta.org/osta/html/ostatech.html

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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