> To be honest, I blame Unicode. Why allow different representations for the same character, and then provide a normalized form anyway, except it's not one normalized form but several?
That's not really the issue here. Even if you can avoid normalization in some languages the problem will come back in others. For instance what are you going to do about invisible characters, control characters or more? Traditionally software attempted to just ignore the problems and let it blow up in other places. For some fun issues just try whitespace and bell characters in filenames and navigate around in your shell.
Normalization is just one of many issues with filenames.
That's not really the issue here. Even if you can avoid normalization in some languages the problem will come back in others. For instance what are you going to do about invisible characters, control characters or more? Traditionally software attempted to just ignore the problems and let it blow up in other places. For some fun issues just try whitespace and bell characters in filenames and navigate around in your shell.
Normalization is just one of many issues with filenames.