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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jan 23, 2008, 17:32 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0801230930390.1741@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <98F90EB6-1930-4643-8C6C-CA11CB123BAA@sb.org>

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> Well yes, any context in which a string is treated as Unicode instead of an
> opaque sequence of bytes will probably lead to normalization at some point
> (e.g. when searching text, I'm going to want Märchen and Märchen to be treated
> as the same string).

As pointed out (multiple times), this is only true if the programmer is a moron.

You do not need to - and *should* not - convert to a common normalization in order to compare to Uncode strings. You should just compare them with a Unicode-aware comparison routine. It will be faster, and it will avoid corrupting the input.

Sadly, stupid people are much too common.

		Linus