Re: Git, Mac OS X and German special characters

From: Andreas Krey <a.krey@gmx.de>
Date: Oct 1, 2011, 19:47 UTC
Message-ID: <20111001194746.GA16826@inner.h.iocl.org>
In-Reply-To: <4E872288.10503@op5.se>

On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:24:08 +0000, Andreas Ericsson wrote: ...

Show 8 quoted lines

> The trouble is that they may represent two different files on a
> different filesystem. The Linux kernel repo has plenty of files
> that exist with both uppercase and lowercase characters, like so:
> SOMEFILE_driver.c
> somefile_driver.c
> 
> This is perfectly valid on all sensible and case-sensitive
> filesystems, but breaks horribly on HFS.

It also breaks on windows, except in at least one country[1]. And the latter alone is good reason why no VCS should try to forbid to use different characters that some filesystems (and only some) consider the same.

> There are other, far more
> "interesting" cases when you involve special chars such as the
> german umlaut, or the swedish åäö characters.

Care to share some?

The question is, should git forbid two filenames that consist of the *same* characters, only differently uni-encoded? I don't think anyone would make two files named 'Büro', with different unicode encodings. But as far as I know that is a shady area.

Andreas

[1] Which has 'i with dot' and 'i without dot' both in uppercase
    and lowercase variant, so I and i are not the 'same'.