This article assumes that you're already familiar with things like building kernels, applying patches and so on. The target audience is the "advanced end user", and also the Debian developers responsible for the packages concerned who I hope will be motivated to incorporate some of this work.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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