Bug#685186: IA64 (Itanium) Wheezy, ELILO installation failed, patch proposal

[Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 09:09:46PM +0200, Stephan Schreiber wrote:
[...]
> I don't want to start a discussion about the UTF-8 default for FAT
> here but you can read, for example, in the "Using UTF-8 with Gentoo"
> [2] of the Gentoo project:
> "You should avoid setting Default iocharset for fat to UTF-8, as it
> is not recommended."
> 
> The reason is that you will experience 'glyphed' characters in
> filenames when you exchange FAT volumes with Windows when you mount
> FAT using UTF-8 on Linux.
[...]

This is what happens if you have applications that assume that
filename encoding matches the locale, and the locale encoding is
Latin-1 (or something very similar).  You can work around those
applications by mounting FAT/VFAT volumes with iocharset set to match
the locale those applications run in.  (But if you have a mix of
applications that assume different filename encodings then you lose.)

Sadly, basic commands like ls have this problem and probably can't
be changed due to compatibility concerns.  Using a UTF-8 locale
(which I think the installer always selects by default) and
iocharset=utf8 is therefore likely to have the best result.

None of this is particularly relevant to the EFI boot volume, though,
as all filenames on there should be ASCII-only.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
                                                              - Albert Camus