hal and locale

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 16:28 +0000, Jethro Tull wrote:
> I would like to know how HAL handles locale.
> 
> When i mount ntfs partitions through the media:/ interface in
> konqueror there are files that i can't see in the drive. That's
> because their names contain some special characters that are specific
> to my locale. But when I mount the partition with command line then
> it's ok. It means that HALd does not use the LANG env variable.
> anyone knows about that?
> 

I think you just need to configure your locale system-wide.
Alternatively have KDE pass the appropriate mount options (e.g.
iocharset and codepage) corresponding to your locale.

For the record, names are stored on NTFS file systems in Unicode. So
assuming that the OS (and your KDE session) uses Unicode you should
never ever have any problems. This is also true for FAT, UCS2 is used
there. As a corollary, UI dialogs for setting things like iocharset= or
codepage= is almost always a bug; OS vendors and users simply need to
switch to using Unicode. That's probably why you can't configure such
things in Windows or OS X either.

FWIW, I'm interested in this as I'm pondering whether I should have a
"Configure Mount Options" button in the gnome-disk-utility stuff I'm
working on. The conclusion I've reached is that we shouldn't have
anything like that. 

However, as I've used ISO-8859-1 my whole life, I'm not familiar with
whether this is something people would need. Apart from the fact that
lots of people asked for a "Configure Mount Option" feature in
gnome-mount which I reluctantly added. The options are that people asked
for this because they were either a) using a misconfigured system; or b)
because there really is a need for it. My money is on a) but I'd be
happy to add it if someone can explain to me that I'm wrong. Thanks!

      David