From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:26:43 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Design for pathname encoding gitattribute [RESEND]
Message-ID: <7vlk6iv0ik.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080122050215.DE198200A2@wilber.wgtn.cat-it.co.nz>

Sam Vilain <sam.vilain@catalyst.net.nz> writes:

> Some projects may like to enforce a particular encoding is used for
> all filenames in the repository.  Within the UTF-8 encoding, there are
> four normal forms (see http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/), any of which
> may be a reasonable repository format choice.  Additionally, some
> filesystems may have a single encoding that they support when writing
> local filenames.  To support this, iconv and a normalization library
> must have the information they need to perform the correct conversion.

Isn't there a chicken-and-egg problem?  The attributes are by
nature per-path, and you need to match the pathname string with
a pattern to decide which attribute definition to apply to a
given path.  Before knowing what encoding the pathname you have
just read from readdir(3), how would you match that pathname
with the pattern in the gitattributes file?

I can buy the .git/config (and an in-tree .git-encoding,
perhaps), though.