On Oct 2, 2008, at 9:39 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
If you don't make a habit of borking your own filesystems with dodgy filenames, it runs fine.
I really hope the individuals making this argument are being
facetious. I don't think this is the source of the problem at all.
The expect the most common occurrence of the problem comes from
sharing of drives between operating systems and individual
configurations; those ubiquitous little USB "thumb" drives get shared
between all kinds of computers these days as people share files they
don't want to or can't pass over a network for whatever reason.
(Those drives might actually serve other purposes first, such as being
music players, and so may have no other interfaces for transferring
files.)
If someone hands me a USB flash drive with filenames encoded in
whatever is reasonable for them, I should be able to use Python tools
on the files without having to use non-Python tools to copy or rename
the file first. The possibility of a conflicting encoding is
increased if the source machine is configured to use a very different
encoding, clearly, but that's not that unusual.
The world is smaller than it used to be, and we really need to
understand that.
-Fred
-- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org>