Re: git on MacOSX and files with decomposed utf-8 file names

Here's a reliable test case to test filename normalization on Mac OS.

------ cut here ------- cat > test.pl << EOF #!/usr/bin/perl -CO print "M".pack("U",0x00E4)."rchen\n"; print "Ma".pack("U",0x0308)."rchen\n"; EOF chmod +x test.pl ./test.pl | xargs touch echo M* | xxd -g1 ------ cut here -------

On an NFS mounted filesystem, what you will get is this:

0000000: 4d 61 cc 88 72 63 68 65 6e 20 4d c3 a4 72 63 68 Ma..rchen M..rch 0000010: 65 6e 0a en.

and on an HFS+ mounted filesystem, what you will get is this:

0000000: 4d 61 cc 88 72 63 68 65 6e 0a                    Ma..rchen.

So this demonstrates that on my MacOS 10.4.11 system, on NFS, MacOS is doing no normalization, as it is creating two files. On HFS+, MacOS is mapping both filenames to the same decomposed name.

More (or not) surprisingly, given Kevin Ballard's "reliable source":

  "In Mac OS X,  SMB, MSDOS, UDF, ISO 9660 (Joliet), NTFS and ZFS file
  systems all store in one form -- NFC.  We store in NFC since that what is
  expected for these files systems."

Using a Sony Reader (which uses an internal FAT filesystem) hooked up to a MacOS 10.4.11 system:

% /fs/u1/tmp/test.pl | xargs touch % echo M* | xxd -g1 0000000: 4d 61 cc 88 72 63 68 65 6e 0a Ma..rchen.

.. which is the decomposed form. So it looks like on FAT/MSDOS filesystems MacOS 10.4.11 normalizes files to NFD, which will *not* do the right thing as far as Windows compatibility is concerned on USB sticks, et. al. Mac OS users would be well advised not to use non-ASCII names in their filesystems if they care about interoperating with other systems. :-P

							- Ted