[Vm-dev] Mac and Unix file/directory/clipboard interface?

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Sun Jun 3 15:09:38 UTC 2007


On Jun 3, 2007, at 6:34 , Andreas Raab wrote:

> Hi Folks -
>
> Since I just went through all of this, can someone explain to me  
> what string encoding the Unix and Mac VMs use for interfacing the  
> file, directory and clipboard functions? If these are all UTF-8  
> based (which I suspect) then should we just define that *all*  
> strings passed to the VM are to be interpreted as UTF-8 and any VM  
> or function that doesn't deal with UTF-8 correctly is considered  
> broken and needs fixing? It strikes me as a nice, elegant solution  
> to solve this problem once and forever.

As John mentioned, the unix VM has command line options to choose the  
encoding that is presented to unix. Default still is MacRoman to be  
compatible with older images.

Unfortunately, there is no primitive to tell the VM which encoding to  
use, or a way to ask which one the VM is using (vm attributes  
1005-1007 were proposed some time ago for the latter purpose). I have  
a changeset (*) that makes accented filenames work slightly more  
reliably under unix - but it has to resort to second-guessing the  
command line parameters ... assumes MacRoman if it does not find  
"latin1" as an option. Not pretty.

- Bert -

(*) http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2007-March/ 
001046.html



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