[sword-devel] Sword apps -vs- Windows NTFS UTF16

[Karl Kleinpaste]

This is mostly a question of curiosity.

When our first Xiphos release happened after port to Win32, the initial
3.0.0 lasted about 2 days before someone in Europe tried our Win32
installer and reported Xiphos crashing.  The problem was that his
Windows Vista login name had an accented character (Rubén) and NTFS
crashed Xiphos on passing pathnames with that.  This resulted in a rapid
analysis of Sword I/O to find everywhere we could insulate ourselves
from NTFS using GLib.  So ::open became g_open, closedir became
g_close_dir, and so on, resulting in a patch that's become part of
Xiphos.  We released 3.0.1 within the week.

We've been using that patch ever since.  Its effectiveness broke for a
while because GLib people damaged something in g_open, but I recently
found a workaround, so again we're building for Win32 with patched Sword.

So the curiosity is: I've heard for years, mostly as rumor, that all
Sword apps are subject to crashing in the Win32 environment due to this
lack of handling non-ASCII characters in pathnames.  Is this true?  How
do other apps handle this possibility?  Is there any prognosis for
changes to Sword to insulate itself, without requiring GLib?  GLib is a
solution for Xiphos because we already use it heavily, but I assume most
apps don't.
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