Re: [tlug] Kanji file names-- how to change encoding, Mac OS X/Darwin file names

[Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

On Jan 20, 2006, at 2:33 PM, David Riggs wrote:

> > system, with the kanji file names intact, but changed to utf-8  
> >encoding.
> >http://j3e.de/linux/convmv
>
> Wow, thanks so very much. This is just perfect. Installs right from  
> debian archives.
>
> My next question was going to be how to do this for Darwin i.e. Mac  
> OS X file names, which I cannot read no matter what I do. Convmv  
> manual seems to say that Apple has it so screwed up that it is not  
> possible to read much less convert file names.
	
	Yeah, I was very bummed about this myself as I was hoping to use
convmv on my OS X box but it seems Normalization Form D strikes again.
These UTF-8 normalization forms and their interactions when actually  
trying
to deal with them are currently something that looks like some black  
magic
that I definitely don't pretend to understand very well (if at all).

>
>
> This is what I have experienced, alas.
>
> Anyone else worried about this? I have a ton of great stuff that is  
> locked up in this unreadable filename problem.

	I don't have your immediate problems but I would like to understand
this situation more.  Learning about NFD and NFC for UTF-8 felt like
learning about more turtles lurking underneath the 'one true turtle'.
The subtle differences of NFD and NFC manifested itself when I was
trying to write some text files using Vietnamese in OS X then moved
them over to a FreeBSD machine and noticed the accent marks
weren't attached.  *sigh*
I thought UTF-8 was going to make things a bit easier for dealing with
filename encodings and file encodings but these normalization
forms add one more bit of complexity.

Alain