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

On Jan 16, 2008, at 8:16 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org 
 > wrote:

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote:

quoted

I'm speaking as a user, and as such, I shouldn't even have to know  
that it's
possible to write the same character in multiple different ways.

The thing is, you seem to argue that what OS X does helps you as the  
user.

But you are arguing based on incorrect assumptions.

First off, we've had years and years and years of usage of non- 
corrupting
filesystems (pretty much every UNIX OS around since day 1, and many  
other
OS's too), and it's simply not true that it's a problem. You see the
filename in the file dialog, and you open it, and you're done. OS X  
isn't
any "easier" in this regard.

In fact, this whole thread comes from the fact that the OS X choice  
that
you *think* is easier, is in fact not easier at all. It's not easier  
for
the user, it's not easier for the application programmer, and the  
really
sad part is that it's very much *not* easier for OS X itself either  
(ie
they had to literally write extra code with nasty tables to do it,  
and it
really does hurt them in performance and complexity).

And _that_ is why the OS X situation is so sad. Apple literally added
extra code to make things slower and more complex *and* harder to use
reliably.

Does it show up in normal behaviour? Of course not. You'd probably  
never
see it in real life outside of test-suites. People simply don't even  
tend
to use filenames outside of US-ASCII, and when they do use them, input
methods really *do* tend to do the normalization for you.

But when it comes to automation (which is what computers are all  
about),
the OS X choice is literally the wrong one. And there's no _upside_.  
It's
all downside. Which is why it's so stupid.

I bet it only exists because OS X engineers didn't really even think  
about
it, and they just assumed that "normalization is helpful". They took  
your
stance - thinking it was worth it, without ever really thinking it
through.

           Linus

I believe it exists because HFS+ was created at a time when the Mac  
was moving from a multi-encoding world (which was a nightmare) to a  
Unicode world and they wanted to remove ambiguity in filenames. But I  
wasn't around when they made this decision so this is just a guess.

-Kevin Ballard