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Re: Cross-Platform Version Control

From
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date
May 13, 2009, 21:20 UTC
Message-ID
<alpine.LFD.2.01.0905131410260.3343@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To
<20090513210425.GD6579@mit.edu>
On Wed, 13 May 2009, Theodore Tso wrote:
> 
> Stupid question --- if we get something that works for Windows and
> MacOS X, is there any reason why we need to solve the general problem
> of case-insentive filesystems?

Qutie frankly, I don't think we're even very close to getting anything that works for Windows of OS X.

Case-insensitivity is _hard_.

The "easy" case is to just handle the OS X craxy pseudo-NFD format, and at least turn that into NFC (and perhaps add a config option to do latin1 and EUC-JP to utf-8 too) and. At that point, we at least handle regular utf-8 the same way.

Doing the latin1/EUC-JP thing would actually to some degree be more interesting than the OS X NFD case, because that really does require two-way conversion, and we can "test" that even on sane filesystems (ie play at having a Latin1 filesystem).

That said, I suspect there aren't that many people who care about latin1 filesystems. I dunno about EUC-JP (and variants - for all I know, shift-JIS and other cases may be the more common ones).

Of course, if we do everything right, maybe the windows people would actually like us to keep the filesystem-native representation in UTF-16LE or whatever the crazy format is that Windows really uses deep down.

My point being that all of these things happen even without the added worry about case. And in many ways, not worrying about case should probably be the first step. We do have some support for worrying about case, but trying to solve both things at the same time isn't going to be workable, I suspect.

Case insensitivity should never ever involve a _conversion_ (if it does, you get all kinds of crazy behavior), it's just purely a _comparison_ issue, so the two really are fundamentally different.

Of course, the reason OS-X seems to be so messed up is exactly that the morons at Apple didn't understand the difference between conversion and comparison, and mixed them up.

		Linus
Previous: Theodore TsoNext: Daniel Barkalow
Message 20 of 59 in “Re: Cross-Platform Version Control”
  1. Esko LuontolaMay 12, 2009
  2. Shawn O. PearceMay 12, 2009
  3. Johannes SchindelinMay 12, 2009
  4. Esko LuontolaMay 12, 2009
  5. Johannes SchindelinMay 12, 2009
  6. Esko LuontolaMay 12, 2009
  7. Johannes SchindelinMay 13, 2009
  8. Esko LuontolaMay 13, 2009
  9. Alex RiesenMay 13, 2009
  10. Johannes SchindelinMay 13, 2009
  11. Jeff KingMay 12, 2009
  12. Johannes SchindelinMay 12, 2009
  13. Linus TorvaldsMay 13, 2009
  14. Linus TorvaldsMay 13, 2009
  15. Andreas EricssonMay 13, 2009
  16. Linus TorvaldsMay 13, 2009
  17. Martin LanghoffMay 13, 2009
  18. Linus TorvaldsMay 13, 2009
  19. Theodore TsoMay 13, 2009
  20. Linus TorvaldsMay 13, 2009
  21. Daniel BarkalowMay 13, 2009
  22. Linus TorvaldsMay 13, 2009
  23. Matthias AndreeMay 13, 2009
  24. Linus TorvaldsMay 13, 2009
  25. Jay SoffianMay 13, 2009
  26. Matthias AndreeMay 13, 2009
  27. Dmitry PotapovMay 12, 2009
  28. Martin LanghoffMay 12, 2009
  29. Jakub NarebskiMay 12, 2009
  30. Extend sample pre-commit hook to check for non ascii file/usernamesHeiko Voigt, May 12, 2009
  31. Jakub NarebskiMay 12, 2009
  32. Extend sample pre-commit hook to check for non ascii filenamesHeiko Voigt, May 14, 2009
  33. Martin LanghoffMay 15, 2009
  34. Heiko VoigtMay 18, 2009
  35. Jakub NarebskiMay 18, 2009
  36. check for filenames that only differ in case to sample pre-commit hookHeiko Voigt, Jun 20, 2009
  37. Jakub NarebskiMay 15, 2009
  38. Extend sample pre-commit hook to check for non ascii filenamesHeiko Voigt, May 18, 2009
  39. Johannes SixtMay 18, 2009
  40. Heiko VoigtMay 18, 2009
  41. Johannes SixtMay 18, 2009
  42. Extend sample pre-commit hook to check for non ascii filenamesHeiko Voigt, May 19, 2009
  43. Junio C HamanoMay 18, 2009
  44. Julian PhillipsMay 18, 2009
  45. Junio C HamanoMay 15, 2009
  46. Peter KreftingMay 14, 2009
  47. Esko LuontolaMay 14, 2009
  48. Andreas EricssonMay 14, 2009
  49. Johannes SchindelinMay 14, 2009
  50. Dmitry PotapovMay 15, 2009
  51. Cross-Platform Version ControlJohn Tapsell, May 13, 2009
  52. Jay SoffianMay 13, 2009
  53. Alex RiesenMay 13, 2009
  54. Jay SoffianMay 13, 2009
  55. John TapsellMay 13, 2009
  56. Nicolas PitreMay 13, 2009
  57. Johannes SchindelinMay 13, 2009
  58. Andreas EricssonMay 13, 2009
  59. Miles BaderMay 14, 2009

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