Bug 125348 - change request: sftp should use UTF-8 as default encoding
Summary: change request: sftp should use UTF-8 as default encoding
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: kio
Classification: Frameworks and Libraries
Component: sftp (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Platform: Gentoo Packages Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Dawit Alemayehu
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2006-04-11 12:33 UTC by Gilles Schintgen
Modified: 2009-09-08 11:20 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Gilles Schintgen 2006-04-11 12:33:01 UTC
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.0)
Installed from:    Gentoo Packages

Please make UTF-8 the default encoding for kio_sftp. This is consistent with http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-12.txt:

  The preferred encoding for filenames is UTF-8. This is
  consistent with IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages
  [RFC2277] and it is further supposed that the server is more
  likely to support any local character set and be able to
  convert it to UTF-8.

The rest of section 6 is also pleading strongly in favour of UTF-8. This is also consistent with other clients' behaviour. For example CyberDuck and WinSCP default to UTF-8. At least that's what I concluded from these two pages:
http://cyberduck.ch/changelog.php
http://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_login_sftp

In order to avoid problems, it's therefore advisable to change kio_sftp's default encoding to UTF-8. (Currently it's Latin 1.)

Finally, it's simply the right thing to do on modern distributions, since for a few years filenames have been stored in UTF-8, and sftp sends them as UTF-8. In this case, Latin 1 is clearly outdated. Out of the box kio_sftp won't even work properly when connecting to localhost. IMHO, that's unacceptable.

Thanks for considering this change.

The IETF draft also specifies an extension mechanism for encoding detection. This could also be considered, even if the changes would be more important. Note however that
  "A server that does not send this extension MUST send all
   filenames encoded in UTF-8."

See bugs #105186 and #125212 for similar issues.
Comment 1 Jan Leewe Behrendt 2006-05-17 23:00:06 UTC
I absolutely agree. Last week I almost went mad trying to find out why the sftp-server does not support UTF-8.
When I found out that actually kio_sftp was the thing to blame, I thought that this is really something which ought to be changed...
Comment 2 Andreas Schneider 2009-09-08 11:20:18 UTC
kio_sftp has been rewritten using libssh. I've tested it and it works just fine here. This will be released with KDE 4.4.0.