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

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Jan 21, 2008, 20:32 UTC
Message-ID: <85tzl66ht6.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0801211151180.20753@xanadu.home>

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Normalization will always hurt performances.  This is an overhead.
> Sometimes that overhead might be insignificant and not be perceptible,
> but sometimes it is.  And Git is clearly in the later
> case. Performances will be hurt big time the day it is made aware of
> that normalization.  This is why there is so much resistance about it,
> especially when the benefits of normalizing file names are not shown
> to be worth their cost in performance and complexity, as other systems
> do rather fine without it.

Normalization is cheap if you normalize user input. The user will always be quite slower than any reasonable normalization algorithm. But in the filesystem, one is normalizing the same stuff over and over.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum