[Nautilus-list] A fix for non-ASCII characters (and hello)

[Håvard Wigtil <havardw stud ntnu no>]

I've been looking at how I can contribute to Nautilus. I built Gnome 2
from CVS, and discovered that Nautilus can't even spell my name!
('Håvard' becomes 'H?vard').  Investigation shows that the file name
conversion code (make_valid_utf8 in libnautilus-private/nautilus-file.c)
doesn't try to convert non-ASCII characters, it just replaces them with
question marks.

I've filed a bug in bugzilla, and attatched my first attempt at a patch:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69059

This does not solve the special case where the UTF-8 escape marker ('Â',
capital A with a rooftop over), because a string containging this char
may pass as valid UTF-8. (Try to create a file called 'Test©', it will
show as 'Test©' with my patch.) The only solution to this that I can see
is to always convert file names to UTF-8.


As I said I've been looking at how I can contribute. I've been
programming since I first got my hands on a computer (about 14 years
ago), but mostly in Java the last years. I want to return to system
programming, but my C is more than a little bit rusty, so please forgive
me if it looks clumsy. (And using Java, I've forgotten all about memory
management ;)

I realize there is much work to do on Nautilus, but there is also a
large codebase to understand, so I hope someone knowledgeable can point
me to things that needs doing. (Just grepping for
GNOME2_CONVERSION_COMPLETE is currently a too vague job description for
me.)



--

    Håvard

havardw stud ntnu no||http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~havardw||+47 93 84 64 68
All it takes to start an avalanche is one snowflake||Or a snowboarder
     Oh! Un Fraggle! Regarde, maman! J'ai attrapé un Fraggle!