Re: [RFC PATCH] Re: Empty directories...

From: Brian Gernhardt <benji@silverinsanity.com>
Date: Jul 22, 2007, 04:00 UTC
Message-ID: <1DB4C18A-A21B-4176-85AD-A86C92178F54@silverinsanity.com>
In-Reply-To: <85tzrxslms.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On Jul 21, 2007, at 1:38 PM, David Kastrup wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
>
>> So git filenames are very much a "stream of bytes", not anything
>> else. And they need to sort 100% reliably, always the same way, and
>> never with any localized meaning.
>
> There is some utf-8/Unicode trouble to be expected in connection with
> that eventually: some, but not all operating and/or file systems
> canonicalize file names, replacing accented letters by a combining
> accent and the letter.  But that's beside the point.

This issue exists today. OS X does a number of things to filenames, one of which is normalizing all UTF. The resulting error is wholly non-intuitive, but easy to solve. Git thinks both that the file exists under the name it expects and that the file is being ignored as the name OS X uses. The solution is to put the OS X normalized form into .git/info/exclude. Any other solution involves platform- dependent hackery and inclusion of Unicode libraries. I perused this for a short while some months ago, but was convinced to leave it be.

~~ Brian