Re: cyg1.7 - DOS character remapping: change request.

[Thomas Wolff <towo at towo dot net>]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> 2009/11/29 Linda Walsh:
>   
> >        I'm aware that this would reserve the 'display forms'
> > of those chars and map them them to their real forms when
> > interpreted within cygwin.  I don't see this to be a problem.
> >     
> But it is a problem. It would make it impossible to use the wide forms
> of those deadly chars in Cygwin filenames.
>
> Btw, does anyone know why those wide ASCII chars exist in the first place?
<http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML018/0289.html>
sheds some light on the issue.
Their nature as kind of presentation forms might slightly support 
Linda's view. However, like the other presentation forms, they have in 
fact their own Unicode code points which makes the round-trip 
counter-argument strong.
> Do they occur in East Asian character sets?
>   
They are actually listed in all CJK character sets (checking i18n data). 
Whether this was really used or not, it makes their view as 
"presentation forms" weaker.

> > _I_ use those [wide ASCII chars] in filesnames,
> > and know of no compatibility problems having them
> > treated as 'real' ascii characters under cygwin --
> > since I am just using them for 'display' purposes
> > in file names like like "Music:the group:title 1/3".
> >     
> Sounds like you've found a good solution there already. The wide forms
> show up correctly in Explorer, Cygwin, and via Samba, don't they?
>
> To make them more convenient to use, you could add them to your
> keyboard layout using Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator, e.g. with
> AltGr+':' for the wide colon.
>   
Sounds like a good proposal. On the other hand, I can also understand Linda.
Trying to conciliate, what about a $CYGWIN option to map pathname ":" to 
filesystem fullwidth "ï" etc?
To meet concerns of unambigous filename representation, it could also be 
a one-way option, so mapping back filesystem "ï" to itself, and the 
Interix code to ASCII ":".

Thomas

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