tlug: Encoding troubles

[Klaus Kudielka <klaus.kudielka@example.com>]

Hello,

I'm trying to set up a Linux box with an MO and a DVD-RAM drive
for Windows and Mac users to use.

Of course, users want to read/write both HFS and VFAT disks (and ext2,
but that's only me). Of course, they want Japanese filenames.

So far I have Samba running and found out that:
  * Japanese Windows obviously uses SJIS when talking to SMB servers,
    but Unicode when writing on VFAT partitions.
  * Macs use SJIS when writing to HFS partitions.

This means that currently Windows clients can perfectly read/write
Japanese filenames on HFS disks, but not on VFAT disks!

There seem to be three solutions to the problem:
1. modify the FAT code in the kernel to support iocharset=SJIS.
2. mount the VFAT partitions with utf8=1 and modify Samba to support
   different per-share filename encodings, including utf8.
3. define UTF-8 to be the standard filename encoding at the application
   level. Add SJIS<->UTF-8 ranslation to HFS and modify Samba to
   support UTF-8 for local filenames (per-share setting not needed).

Question of the day: Which would be the "right" direction to go?

I don't even want to think about potential problems with AppleTalk...

-Klaus
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