CIFS vs. NFS and other filesystems (was Client for Samba Networks)

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2001 at 12:52:22PM -0600, Steven French wrote:
> A typo on my earlier list:

> There should not be an entry for Unicode under NFS v3 strengths

I would actually be surprised if NFS v3 didn't handle UTF8 filenames 
transparently.  This is the great strength of UTF8 as an encoding -- 
except when it comes to rendering strings, doing stringwise
editing/searching operations, or needing to know the difference between 
the length of the string in /bytes/ versus the length of the string in 
/characters/, UTF8 is virtually indistinguishable from, say, an 
ISO-8859-x character set.  I can't think of a reason that NFSv3 would be 
tripped up by UTF8 unless it strips the high bit on filenames.

This is the same form that 'Unicode support' takes in the ext2 
filesystem for Linux, btw -- use UTF-8 everywhere, and most existing 
code that doesn't deal with string rendering can't tell the difference.

> is interesting.   Whether sending Unicode/UCS-2 on the wire is a strength
> or weakness of CIFS ... since it is optional (for CIFS) and solved real
> customer internationalization problems, I find it easier to view as a
> strength.     I don't know what would happen with the longer UTF-16 or
> UTF-32 strings (see http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr19/ ) though.
> We should try it. The following quote from the Unicode FAQ
> (http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html#6) made me wonder what
> would happen if one of these strings was sent by a CIFS server or client
> (should not be too hard to try).

Perhaps you can poll Apple, to see what results they've had... and 
perhaps you should also poll Jeremy, since it sounds like their use of 
UTF-16 doesn't sit well with him. :)

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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