Minutes of the 20 May 2010 Teleconference Austin-482 Page 1 of 1 Submitted by Andrew Josey, The Open Group. May 21 , 2010 Attendees Andrew Josey, The Open Group Don Cragun, PASC OR Mark Brown, IBM, TOG OR Eric Blake, Red Hat Geoff Clare, The Open Group Nick Stoughton, USENIX, ISO/IEC OR Apologies Ulrich Drepper, Red Hat This weeks meeting was the second meeting dedicated to a discussion on how to handle unusual and non portable filenames. We reviewed Donn Terry's proposal sent to the reflector as mail sequence 13935 . Concerns were raised about whether this could be done in a header file; that it would need to be done at runtime during a mount on a filesystem. State could change during the lifetime of a process, and so an application would still need to be prepared to cope with any type of filename. We discussed whether there could be sysconf() and pathconf() additions so you can query the behavior of the filesystem at a current point in time, does it support newlines in filenames, does it support other control characters, does it support spaces or trailing dots in filenames etc. We could include sysconf() additions that can return the system wide status for all of these. A feeling that the characteristics of a filesystem are usually known at the point when the driver is written so the provision of this information for a filesystem should not be a burden. Perhaps we need two types of calls: Can i create a file with this characteristics? Will i encounter a file with this type of characteristic? Some discussion on whether pathconf() ought to mention more on mount points. Action on Eric to submit an aardvark. Eric had posted a list of interfaces that might need updates for handling non-portable filenames. There was a discussion about whether it would be an option for utilities, or an environment variable, with some consensus towards the latter. Discussion followed on new interfaces, and how they should be named. It was agreed that the goal here is to produce a white paper, and that some implementation experience will be needed before we can address this in the standard. Next Steps ---------- The next call will be on May 27 at 16:00 UK time/08:00 Pacific and will continue on aardvark processing, and then some further discussion on the topic of unusual (non-portable) filenames. http://austingroupbugs.net See the calendar for the list of dialup numbers. An IRC channel will be available for the meeting irc://irc.freestandards.org #austin ICAL: http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/nvctqtstkuni3fab9k3jqtrt4g@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic XML: http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/nvctqtstkuni3fab9k3jqtrt4g@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic