normalizing filenames and strings

["Denis Jacquerye" <moyogo gmail com>]

Hi,

There's an interesting Unicode bug with all gnome apps at the moment.
Canonically equivalent file names are not considered equivalent by
applications.

This is an issue because for a normal user, the character sequence
doesn't matter, even more so if you consider what Unicode says.

Currently it is possible in Gnome apps to create/save two
files/directories with different characters sequences but equivalent
names. For example 'école' (precompose e acute) and 'école' (e +
combining acute). Also, if one is in a directory and the other form is
type as the path, no file is found.
User should not have to worry about using the right character sequence
for what is the same name to them.

Filenames could also be NFC normalized when created, although that's
not absolutely necessary.

I opened a meta bug about the issue
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423036 but it was suggested
to raise the issue one the desktop-devel list. The issue also affect
searches and comparisons in most apps.
This could be fixed at a low level, in gtk filechooser for some cases
or in apps. Gnome-vfs should handle that too.

If you want to compare with other platform, Mac OS X prevents creating
two filenames with equivalent names, Windows Vista/XP doesn't care.
Most apps don't handle search/compare/sort properly.

Cheers

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye