[Owncloud] special characters in filenames

[Emre Erenoglu]

On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 5:31 PM, Thomas Müller <thomas.mueller at tmit.eu>wrote:

>
> Am Donnerstag, dem 02.08.2012 um 15:22 schrieb Frank Karlitschek:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > we have an interesting question where I would love to get some more
> opinions.
> >
> > The question is how ownCloud should handle special characters in
> filenames. ownCloud itself should work always with UTF8 and do proper
> encoding so that ownCloud can work with all possible characters.
> > The problems are the underlying filesystems.
> >
> > So the ownCloud server can run on Windows/Linux/Mac servers with lot´s
> of different filesystems and we have clients for
> Windows/Linux/Mac/iOS/Android with more different filesystems. All this
> filesystems have limitation for allowed characters and handling of
> uppercase/lowercase filenames.
> >
> > So what can/should ownCloud do if someone want´s to sync a file with a
> special character that´s supported on one platform but not on another?
> > Should be change the filename? Or don´t sync at all?
> >
>
> On the server:
> We could save the real file name and path in the database together with a
> unique identifier (e.g. GUID).
> This GUID can be used to save the file on the server's file system.
>
> On the client:
> Well we can convert the file name as close as possible to the original
> file name. (I know this sounds easier than it actually is ;-) )
> Because of the file name is no longer the identifier this should be of
> lesser problem if the file name cannot be used properly.
>

My two cents as a user: Why is this still a problem? I am using Linux &
Windows and all my filenames are fine with some accented & special
characters which are not present in English alphabet.  Where's the real
issue with UTF8, why do we need to convert it to anything else? Isn't UTF8
the same for all OS and filesystems and databases etc?

An option could be to limit the support for filesystems, ie to NTFS in
Windows, Ext4 in Linux, etc.

For case sensitivity, one could look at the source of iFolder to see how it
solved this problem in the past, or the client could just raise a conflict
warning to the user when two different files (case sensitivity) with same
names are trying to be written to the same folder. (or skip or rename the
conflicting file and show a log that there were errors).

Side effects:
> The files on the server actually become totally useless.
> E.g. some people access the files via ftp.
> From my point of view this is okay as nobody should mess around with the
> files under OC control.
> But we might get some bad feedback.
>

Yes people shall not access files from the filesystem of the server, but
any clever admin anyway shall not do it.  I guess "owncloud webdav" access
is excluded from this limitation.

-- 
Emre
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