Re: Cross-Platform Version Control

On Wed, 13 May 2009, Martin Langhoff wrote:

Well, I suspect that if we really want to support it, then we'd better.

I can almost guarantee that it will just cause more problems than it solves, and generate some nasty cases that just aren't solvable.

Because it really isn't just "git add". It's every single thing that does a lstat() on a filename inside of git.

Now, the simple OS X case is not a huge problem, since the lstat will succeed with the fixed-up filename too. But as mentioned, the OS X case is the thing that doesn't need a lot of infrastructure _anyway_ - I can almost guarantee that my posted patch (with the added setup.c stuff for get_pathspec()) is going to be _fewer_ lines than some wrapper logic.

Note: in all of the above, I assume that people care more about just plain 
UTF characters (and the insane NFD form OS X uses) than about worrying 
about the _really_ subtle issues of case-independence. Those are a major 
pain, but they will need even more "internal" support, because there 
simply isn't any sane wrapping method.

(You could wrap everything to force lower-casing of all filesystem ops or something, but that would not be acceptable to any sane environment. So in reality you need to accept mixed-case things, and then there is no way to know from the "outside" whether one external mixed-case thing matches some internal index mixed-case thing).

			Linus