Re: [boost] [filesystem] Mac OS default codecvt facet

Subject: Re: [boost] [filesystem] Mac OS default codecvt facet
From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-02-14 20:49:57

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.