Beman Dawes wrote:
I'm less than 100% sure of that. I see discussions indicating locale can have an impact.
Locale can have an impact in that a non-UTF-8 locale breaks programs that use the locale for filename conversions (a behavior common for programs originating on old-school, encoding-agnostic Unix.) Linux is one example of an encoding-agnostic OS, and there is no practical way for FS to do the right thing there, because the encoding can vary depending on the path (one can mount NTFS and HFS+ filesystems and the encoding is given at mount time.) In principle, a Linux-specific implementation of the FS library might be able to query the kernel about the correct encoding for a specific path element, but I doubt that anyone will bother. Either way, once the world switches to UTF-8 everywhere things will be much simpler.