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

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Jan 21, 2008, 16:48 UTC
Message-ID: <86r6gbi0pr.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>
In-Reply-To: <440E4426-BFB5-4836-93DF-05C99EF204E6@sb.org>

Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

> On Jan 21, 2008, at 9:14 AM, Peter Karlsson wrote:
>
>> I happen to prefer the text-as-string-of-characters (or code points,
>> since you use the other meaning of characters in your posts), since I
>> come from the text world, having worked a lot on Unicode text
>> processing.
>>
>> You apparently prefer the text-as-sequence-of-octets, which I tend to
>> dislike because I would have thought computer engineers would have
>> evolved beyond this when we left the 1900s.
>
> I agree. Every single problem that I can recall Linus bringing up as a
> consequence of HFS+ treating filenames as strings is in fact only a
> problem if you then think of the filename as octets at some point. If
> you stick with UTF-8 equivalence comparison the entire time, then
> everything just works.

git calculates hashes over filenames and sorts them. This is not a mere question of "UTF-8 equivalence comparison".

> Granted, this is a problem when you have to operate on a filesystem
> that thinks of filenames as octets,

It also is a problem when operating on a filesystem that considers "ä" a single utf-8 character instead of decomposing it.

> but as I said before, this doesn't mean the HFS+ approach is wrong, it
> just means it's incompatible with Linus's approach.

It is not the business of a file system to juggle with filename representations.

-- 
David Kastrup