[Owncloud] special characters in filenames

[Klaas Freitag]

On 02.08.2012 22:58, Jan-Christoph Borchardt wrote:
> The discussion seems to have veered off the original question.
>
> How it should be handled (regardless of any technical implementation
> difficulties):
> »Don’t sync at all« is not an option. Neither is not letting people
> upload files with special characters or warn them about it.
> Can the ownCloud server have a database in the backend, mapping
> converted filenames to actual filenames? So that supported systems are
> synced the whole filename, and unsupported ones are given the
> appropriate converted one? Does that make sense? Or does it not work
> because WebDAV, FTP etc does not go through the database?
Hmm, I have a hard time to understand how that would work. What is a 
"converted filename" and what an "actual"?

I honestly have a maybe unusual opinion on that. We are talking about a 
problem that exists from day one of computer technology, has improved 
slightly over the years, but is still here. As a result people are 
somehow aware of these kinds of problems.

Of course it would be great if we could solve it within our ownCloud 
universe. But my gut feeling tells me: This is a can of worms and if we 
try to fix it we go on a crusade of informatics IMO - that has never 
been good ;-)

I think we should kind of live with it as our users do and hope that the 
problems get fixed in underlying levels like OS, PHP and so on and not 
think that we can save the planet in our garden here. We can use our 
time (which is not infinite) for things that are more useful for our users.

That said, that does of course not mean that we should'nt fix problems 
that can hurt our users with nasty things like data loss etc.
Maybe we can see it this way: The server is recommended to run on a UTF8 
system and as a result handles most of the issues correctly. Than it 
becomes a client problem which we should fix of course, but mainly with 
a message like "If you name your files that way, you might run in 
unforseeable trouble".

I already spent a lot of effort to get encoding problems fixed in the 
client. For the remaining I'd be happy to get more concrete bug 
descriptions or test cases.

> The thing with WebDAV, FTP and all that stuff is – we should
> discourage people from using WebDAV or FTP or anything manually. Just
> use the web interface or the clients.
No, please not. Taking away WebDAV from ownCloud would be like taking 
away the roof of a house. We flexibility we offer is one of the big plus 
of ownCloud.

regards,

Klaas

>
> On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Frank Karlitschek <frank at owncloud.org> wrote:
>> 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?
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> Frank