From owner-freebsd-hackers  Tue Sep 19 18:51:07 1995
Return-Path: owner-hackers
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id SAA11368
          for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 18:51:07 -0700
Received: from UUCP-GW.CC.UH.EDU (root@UUCP-GW.CC.UH.EDU [129.7.1.11])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with SMTP id SAA11362
          for <hackers@freebsd.org>; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 18:51:03 -0700
Received: from Taronga.COM by UUCP-GW.CC.UH.EDU with UUCP id AA22545
  (5.67a/IDA-1.5); Tue, 19 Sep 1995 20:33:54 -0500
Received: (from peter@localhost) by bonkers.taronga.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id UAA13444; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 20:28:25 -0500
From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Message-Id: <199509200128.UAA13444@bonkers.taronga.com>
Subject: Re: Policy on printf format specifiers?
To: terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 1995 20:28:25 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: peter@taronga.com, hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199509192020.NAA10542@phaeton.artisoft.com> from "Terry Lambert" at Sep 19, 95 01:20:18 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 951       
Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

> > >Rendering the file length meaningless and requiring the use of record
> > >oriented file systems with variant length records to handle data from
> > >fix length input fields from user interaction screens.

> > And this claim is just weird. This is an application issue... file systems
> > have nothing to do with it. If the only things you feed into the kernel
> > are multibyte character strings, you don't need any of this.

> Suprise.  Software engineers write applications.

The software component known as a file system is a fairly simple application.

It doesn't need to even consider the meaning of any multibyte character, it
has to recognise when a "/" is part of a character as opposed to being a
complete character itself, by looking at the high bit of the previous byte.

> 8-).  The complaint isn't
> that you can't work around what is effectively a loss of information, but
> that you have to do so.

What information loss is that?