Re: [apps-discuss] I-D Action: draft-ietf-appsawg-file-scheme-09.txt

[Matthew Kerwin <[e-mail]>]

Hi Mark,

On 16 May 2016 at 17:06, Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Matthew,
>
> I think the new Section 4 is an improvement -- much more precise than it
> was. However, a few questions still linger for me:
>
> > 4.  File Name Encoding
> >
> >    File systems use various encoding schemes to store file and directory
> >    names.  Many modern file systems encode file and directory names as
> >    arbitrary sequences of octets,
>
> This is a bit confusing -- perhaps s/encode/store/ ? Or remove this part
> of the sentence altogether?
>
>
​I'll think about what I'm trying to say here, and how it could be said
better. Your suggestion is probably right.



> >    in which case the representation as an
> >    encoded string often depends on the user's localization settings, or
> >    defaults to UTF-8 [STD63].
> >
> >    Without other encoding information, percent-encoded octets in a file
> >    URI ([RFC3986], Section 2.1) MAY be interpreted according to the
> >    preferred or configured encoding of the system on which the URI is
> >    being interpreted.
>
>
> Do the current implementations of file:// do this -- i.e., use the
> filesystem's encoding for the URI?
>
>
​Apparently. I don't have a spare drive lying around where I can reformat a
partition to test it for myself, though. A discussion I had with Dave
Thaler back at the very start of this draft revolved around the fact that
percent-encoded URIs are ambiguous (apparently a real issue for Windows),
which was why for a very long time the draft contained advice to use an
IRI​ instead, or at the least normalize.



> Doing it that way seems unfortunate; two different users on the same
> machine (or network) won't see good interop in this approach.
>
> If it's this way intentionally, or if we think it can't change, that's
> understandable, but if not we should have a good hard look at changing it
> IMO.
>
> Has there been any discussion of this to date (sorry if I missed it)?
>
>
A fair bit of discussion on what the draft should say (for example
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg14943.html ),
not much discussion on whether we should advise URI libraries to update.

Cheers
-- 
  Matthew Kerwin
  http://matthew.kerwin.net.au/