Cross platform: character sets and filename limitations

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

@usernamegoeshere

Am I right that the windows machine doesnt receive these badly named files and thus never receiving and keeping a copy of these incompatible files from the mac boxes?

Yes.

@usernamegoeshere

If yes, can you please make syncthing use temporary workaround or placeholder filenames or reserved filenames and keeping relevant information such as original filename in its metadata or somehow side-channel structures

This is tricky and I haven’t seen a proposal yet that I liked. Specifically, I don’t like…

• replacing characters with underscores or similar: how do we tell the difference between a file just called foo_bar.txt and one renamed to that from foo:bar.txt? What if both exist on the Mac?

• renaming files to something like above and keeping the actual file name in the index (side channel): what if we lose the index and forget the mapping?

• renaming files to the SHA256 hash of the actual file name or similar: too user unfriendly, and again, what if we just happen to have a file called that to begin with? Also this is one way so again depends on the side channel.

That’s what I come up with from the top of my head, but throw in more ideas and I’ll try to shoot them down. If I can’t, we can implement it.

One thing we could do (but that I don’t particularly like either) is to rename or suggest renaming the files on the source (Mac or Linux).