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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jan 18, 2008, 17:11 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0801180909000.2957@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0801181114430.817@ds9.cixit.se>

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Peter Karlsson wrote:

> 
> But they are not different strings, they are canonically equivalent as
> far as Unicode is concerned.

Fuck me with a spoon.

Why the hell cannot people see that "equivalent" and "same" are two totally different meanings.

> You cannot do a binary comparison of text to see if two strings are
> equivalent.

.. and this is relevant how? They are different strings. Not the same.

Equivalence doesn't matter. Equivalence is *evil*. Equivalence is what gives us case-insensitive filesystems ("because the names are equivalent").

Filesystems don't *want* equivalence. They want a much stronger exactness guarantee. Exactly because sometimes the differences matter.

		Linus

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