[Bug 161673] Cyrillic file names on usb storage devices are displayed as '?????????'

[Kevin Kofler]

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161673


Kevin Kofler kevin kofler chello at changed:

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--- Comment #31 from Kevin Kofler <kevin kofler chello at>  2008-09-27 10:38:31 ---
I'm not convinced the change from CP 850 to CP 437 (by mitchell, CCed) was a
good idea:

<< Use CP 437 instead of 850.  From Wikipedia:

"Code page 850 is a code page that was used in western Europe, under systems
such as DOS. It was also sometimes used on English DOS systems although 
CP437 was generally the default on those. It was largely replaced first with
windows-1252 (often mislabeled as ISO-8859-1) and later by UCS-2 and 
finally UTF-16 (while the NT line was natively unicode from the start issues of
development tool support and compatibility with windows 9x kept most 
applications on the 8 bit code pages). According to Microsoft, it is obsolete
and unsupported." >>

Relying on Wikipedia as a primary source of information is a bad idea,
especially with a such unsourced statement. (I just added the {{fact}}, i.e.
"[citation needed]", template.)

The history as I recall it (and I do have experience with old M$ systems) is
that CP 437 was for all effects replaced with CP 850 for all of Western Europe.
This caused a lot of problems and so often it was manually reconfigured to 437.
However, you have to consider what these problems were: they were problems with
displaying some line drawing characters, which have been replaced with accented
characters from ISO 8859-1 (but in different positions). Now what is more
likely to be used in file names: line drawing characters or accented
characters? So I expect there to be less problems with using 850 for file
systems created with 437 than the opposite. (That said, CP 437 also has Greek
characters which are not in 850, so that may be a problem.)

<< In my own experience accessing a device shared via Samba from both Linux and
Windows systems, I need to set the Linux system to cp437, not 850. >>

Have you actually tried 850? Chances are it doesn't make any difference, unless
you're using Greek letters or line-drawing characters in your file names. It
does make a difference for those European users using the additional accented
characters in CP 850.

<< And using "obsolete and unsupported" codepages is not generally a good idea.
>>

Of course CP 850 is obsolete, but so is CP 437 and all the other "OEM
codepages".

That said, there is indeed a newer replacement for 850, but it's not 437, but
858, which is 850 with the Euro sign instead of the dotless i.

<< That being said, it might be better to find out why 1252 didn't work, since
it should.  Then again, I believe I had tried 1252 before eventually 
getting to cp437 and had issues with it too. >>

And this shows that you don't have enough experience with M$ codepages to make
such a change. CP 1252 obviously doesn't work because it's a Window$ codepage,
not an "OEM codepage" (i.e. DO$ codepage) and FAT uses "OEM codepages".


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