I just mentioned it because even on Mac OS X, you have to do
things differently (before 10.2 and after 10.2). After 10.2(?), you
can rely on OS APIs while before that you have to roll your own.
What I think would be useful would be to have a small _multiplatform_
library that would do whatever is necessary to do both Unicode and
traditional multibyte filenames "right". Maybe something like
u_mkdir(void *name, mode_t mode,
enc_e encoding, size_t size, ulong flags)
u_stat (void *name, struct stat *statbuf,
enc_e encoding, size_t size, ulong flags)
...
The encoding being an enum listing in what charset+encoding the name
is in (I think this listing does *not* need to cover e.g. legacy 8-bit
codepages), and the size telling how many bytes there are in the name.
For such a library to be useable for Perl it would have to have
a BSD or BSD-like license, I think. Pure GPL or even LGPL wouldn't
work, Larry doesn't accept those. The library really should be minimal
in size, so that it could just be included into Perl sources: e.g. all
character set and encoding conversions should be handed off that whatever
is available: iconv(3) or Perl's Encode, for example.
--
Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this
special
biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen
