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

On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 05:04:09PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Sun, 20 Jan 2008, Wincent Colaiuta wrote:

quoted

For what it's worth, their choice wasn't entirely "insane" ie. it did have an
element of rationality: that decomposed forms are a little bit simpler to
sort.

No they are *not*.

In many languages, 'ä' does *not* sort like 'a' at all, and if you think 
it does, you'll sort at least Finnish and Swedish totally wrong (åäö are 
real letters, and they sort at the *end* of the alphabet, they have 
nothing what-so-ever to do with the letters 'a' or 'o').

But there is no way to know whether 'ä' in a document is the Finnish 'ä'
or a 'ä' from, say, German, that sorts after 'a'.

The fact that in *some* languages the decomposed forms sort as the base 
letter is immaterial. It's only true in some cases.

So no, sort order is not it. To sort right, you need to use the a real 
Unicode sort (and the decomposed form is *not* going to help you one bit, 
quite the reverse).

Unicode sort is not enough, there is no language indicator in an Unicode
document, which is why Unicode, while solving a bunch of problems, has
its very own, cf. the infamous CJK problem.

But that's all very OT.

Mike