From: David Kastrup Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:48:32 GMT Subject: Re: git on MacOSX and files with decomposed utf-8 file names Message-ID: <86r6gbi0pr.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz> In-Reply-To: <440E4426-BFB5-4836-93DF-05C99EF204E6@sb.org> Kevin Ballard writes: > 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 "รค" 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