Re: [RFC PATCH] Windows: Assume all file names to be UTF-8 encoded.

From: Peter Krefting <peter@softwolves.pp.se>
Date: Mar 2, 2009, 20:41 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0903022135360.20047@perkele.intern.softwolves.pp.se>
In-Reply-To: <200903021530.01165.trast@student.ethz.ch>

Thomas Rast:

> Have you thought about all the consequences this would have for the *nix 
> people here? [*]

Yeah. It will fix problems trying to check out a Git repository created by me in a iso8859-1 locale on a machine using a utf-8 locale, where both ends would like to have a file named "Ü".

Or, hopefully, a careful adoption of this on Windows won't affect Unixes and other systems with pre-Unicode APIs at all, since the Windows code would be in the "compat" directory.

> you're still in a world of hurt when trying to check out such paths under 
> a locale (or whatever setting might control this new encoding logic) that 
> does not support the whole range of UTF-8.

Yeah. That would be a case similar to the casing problem on Windows.

> With backwards compatibility it's even worse as you're suddenly imposing 
> extra restrictions on what a valid filename in the repository must look 
> like.

Indeed. It is unfortunate that this wasn't properly specified to start with. It's mostly a minor issue since *most* people will not use non-ASCII file names. At least for most of the kind of projects that Git have attracted so far, so the problem is not that big. The problem is if Git is to attract "the masses". Especially on Windows, where file names using non-ASCII are common, this needs to be addressed eventually.

> [*] I'm _extremely_ tempted to write "people using non-broken OSes", but 
> let's pretend to be neutral for a second.

In most cases, I would most definitely agree with you on calling it that, but when it comes to Unicode support, Windows is one of the least broken OSes (with Symbian being my favourite).

-- 
\\// Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/