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

Kevin Ballard [off-list ref] writes:

On Jan 21, 2008, at 9:14 AM, Peter Karlsson wrote:

quoted

I happen to prefer the text-as-string-of-characters (or code points,
since you use the other meaning of characters in your posts), since I
come from the text world, having worked a lot on Unicode text
processing.

You apparently prefer the text-as-sequence-of-octets, which I tend to
dislike because I would have thought computer engineers would have
evolved beyond this when we left the 1900s.

I agree. Every single problem that I can recall Linus bringing up as a
consequence of HFS+ treating filenames as strings is in fact only a
problem if you then think of the filename as octets at some point. If
you stick with UTF-8 equivalence comparison the entire time, then
everything just works.

git calculates hashes over filenames and sorts them.  This is not a mere
question of "UTF-8 equivalence comparison".

Granted, this is a problem when you have to operate on a filesystem
that thinks of filenames as octets,

It also is a problem when operating on a filesystem that considers "ä" a
single utf-8 character instead of decomposing it.

but as I said before, this doesn't mean the HFS+ approach is wrong, it
just means it's incompatible with Linus's approach.

It is not the business of a file system to juggle with filename
representations.

-- 
David Kastrup