Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

These files could be created on a KOI-8-only partition and their names automatically converted when copied out of it?

Technically there is no such thing as a “KOI-8-only partition” because Linux file systems don't care about character encoding in the first place. Of course you can establish a convention among the users of your system(s) that a certain directory (or set of directories) contains files with KOI-8-encoded names; it doesn't need to be a whole partition. But you will have to remember which is which because Linux isn't going to help you keep track.

Of course there's always convmv to convert file names from one encoding to another, and presumably someone could come up with a clever method to overlay-mount a directory with file names known to be in encoding X so that they appear as if they were in encoding Y. But arguably in the year 2020 the method of choice is to move all file names over to UTF-8 and be done (and fix or replace old software that insists on using a legacy encoding). It's also worth remembering that many legacy encodings are proper supersets of ASCII, so people who anticipate that their files will be processed on an UTF-8-based system could simply, out of basic courtesy and professionalism, stick to the POSIX portable-filename character set and save their colleagues the hassle of having to do conversions.