fudging filename characters

[Paul Slootman]

There are a couple of bug reports on the Debian rsync package about
problems with a recipient filesystem that can't cope with all possible
unix filenames.  Notably filenames with question marks are a problem...
I guess that people are trying to backup systems to a SMB share which
presumably is then regularly backupped to tape. This basically sounds
like a reasonable thing to do :-)

Would there be much opposition to an option to mangle filenames if
necessary? In its most trivial form, all characters besides a-zA-z0-9_.-
would be mapped to e.g. _ . Of course, restoring these would be a lot of
work, but at least the rsync transfer would work.

In a later incarnation there might be different mappings, e.g. to a
HTTP-like %XX notation (so space becomes %20, question mark becomes %3F,
% becomes %25, etc.).  The argument to the option could determine the
mapping.


Comments? Suggestions?  What should the option be called?


Paul Slootman