Re: [PATCH] Try URI quoting for embedded TAB and LF in pathnames

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

This is really what my argument boils down to: character set encoding 
should _not_ EVER affect the _transfer_ of the data. It doesn't matter if 
something is latin1 or utf-8, the only thing that matters is the byte 
sequence. Only when you _display_ it should you try to figure out what the 
byte sequence possibly means.

So I repeat: 
 - escape as little as possible
 - make the _viewer_ decide how to view it.

I think the same argument can be made about patch application,
although strictly speaking it is not "viewing".  Let the patch
program decide (or the user to tell her decision to the patch
program) what the unescaped byte sequence in the patch that
represents the path being affected is encoded in, and do
something sensible while taking into account that the pathname
encoding on the working tree may be different from what is
recorded in the patch.

For example, one of my partitions is ntfs mounted with
nls=euc-jp, and I expect the tool to help me apply patches to a
Japanese-named file when the patch is from a system with UTF-8
encoded filenames.