Re: Foreign file names on MS-Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:21:10 +0100
> From: "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Now the important question I promised at the beginning: Should we
> > install this change on the release branch?  Here are the pros and cons
> > that I could think of for this decision:
> > 
> > Cons:
> > 
> >   . It is too close to release for such non-trivial changes.
> > 
> >   . The affected primitives are used in lots of places, and this
> >     change could break them, and the Lisp code that uses them.
> > 
> >   . This problem exists in Emacs for a long time, so it's not a big
> >     deal if it continues to exist some more (until resolved in Emacs
> >     23).
> > 
> >   . The suggested solution is only partial, and the resulting file
> >     names are UGLY.
> > 
> > Pros:
> > 
> >   . The bug is quite grave: it causes real data loss.
> > 
> >   . Whatever code uses the affected primitives is probably already
> >     broken.
> > 
> >   . The change is very simple, so the probability of it being buggy
> >     is very low (but please eyeball the diffs below to make it lower
> >     still).
> 
> Does the problem affect only W9x systems? Does the patch only affect them?

No, on the contrary: this problem cannot at all happen on W9x, unless
they have the Unicode add-on installed.  If they do have it, I think
the change will affect them as well.  But currently, it affects mainly
the newer versions: W2K, XP, and Vista that use NTFS as their main
filesystems.