locale specific for .desktop

Wed Oct 10 01:34:09 PDT 2007

Probably this is a seeked discussion by me. Sould we always put UTF-8 full path or can we put the raw encoded full path without any warranties in Desktop Entry specification?

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le mardi 09 octobre 2007 à 17:10 -0400, Rodney Dawes a écrit :
> 
> 
>>File name encoding is not guaranteed to be in a specific encoding. You
>>can have file names in several encodings in the same directory on the
>>same file system in Linux, at least with ext. If the user's encoding
>>changes, and the file name encoding does not match that, or the system
>>default, there's no guaranteed way to know what it is.
> 
> 
> So what? You have a known encoding in the .desktop file, UTF-8. The
> mapping from this encoding to the file system encoding is not
> the .desktop responsibility, but the application responsibility. If
> applications do not know the filesystem encoding, tough luck, mapping
> won't work no matter what the .desktop encoding is.
> 
> Allowing non-UTF-8 strings in the .desktop file buys you nothing except
> if you posit the user locale encoding is the same as the filesystem
> encoding and don't want bothering converting UTF-8 on the fly to this
> encoding. And then things will horribly break as soon as the user
> examines a filesystem part written by someone else with another locale
> (removable media, remote mounts, etc).
> 
> So the executive summary is:
> 1. if you know the filesystem encoding converting .desktop strings is
> trivial
> 2. if you do not know the filesystem encoding things will break no
> matter what.
> 
> That's why distros like Fedora assume everything is UTF-8 and let
> non-UTF-8 users mop up themselves instead of trying to second-guess
> encoding choices and failing 20% of the time. 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> xdg mailing list
> xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg