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

On Jan 16, 2008, at 11:38 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote:

quoted

	The only way to argue that normalization is wrong is by providing a
good reason to preserve the exact byte sequence, and so far the  
only reason
I've seen is to help git.

Git doesn't care. Just use the *same* sequence everywhere. Make sure
something doesn't change it. Because if something changes it, git will
track it.

The problem is that you don't control the sequence that everybody uses.

See this example:

melo@speed(~)$ uname -a
Linux speed.simplicidade.org 2.6.9-55.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed May 2 14:28:44  
EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
melo@speed(~)$ set | grep LANG
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
melo@speed(~)$ mkdir t
melo@speed(~)$ cd t
melo@speed(~/t)$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
melo@speed(~/t)$ touch á
melo@speed(~/t)$ git-add á
melo@speed(~/t)$ git-commit -m "added a in utf8"
Created initial commit 7a473a2: added a in utf8
  0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  create mode 100644 "\303\241"
melo@speed(~/t)$ export LANG=en_US
melo@speed(~/t)$ touch á
melo@speed(~/t)$ ls -la
total 12
drwxrwxr-x   3 melo melo 4096 Jan 16 23:44 .
drwx--x--x  31 melo melo 4096 Jan 16 23:43 ..
-rw-rw-r--   1 melo melo    0 Jan 16 23:44 á
-rw-rw-r--   1 melo melo    0 Jan 16 23:43 á
drwxrwxr-x   8 melo melo 4096 Jan 16 23:43 .git
melo@speed(~/t)$ git-add á
melo@speed(~/t)$ git-commit -m "added a in iso-latin-1"
Created commit 4282fca: Oláx!
  0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  create mode 100644 "\341"

So two (simulated in this test) users who use different LANG settings  
will be in trouble in no time.

What I take from this conversation is that I have to specify, for  
each project I work on, which encoding we should use, across all  
users, before they start using git with files with accented chars.

The difference I see between us is that if I tell my filesystem that  
I want to name my file with a particular string encoded in X, users  
using encoding Y will be able to read it correctly. I  like my  
filesystem to make that work for me.

Best regards,
-- 
Pedro Melo
Blog: http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/
XMPP ID: melo@simplicidade.org
Use XMPP!