On operating systems other than Mac OS X and Windows, viz., Unix aside from Mac OS X, Java Preferences (java.util.prefs.Preferences) are handled as directories and files in the file system. In particular, nodes in a Preferences subtree are mapped to directories. Sometimes the name of a node might include a character not generally desirable for use in a directory name. Such node names are currently remapped to a different alphabet which is immune to alphabetic case folding but not user friendly in terms of readability. The purpose of the present issue is to change the way these file system preferences are stored to a more user friendly representation.

Depending on how this change were implemented, it could have a compatibility impact. This is the difficult part of the problem: should a new approach to preferences on the affected systems be able to interoperate in any sense with the older approach and, if so, should the interoperation be unidirectional or bidirectional?