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

On Jan 21, 2008, at 6:00 PM, Theodore Tso wrote:

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 05:46:27PM -0500, Kevin Ballard wrote:

quoted

I find it amusing that you keep arguing against having git treat  
filenames
as unicode when, if you had actually taken my advice and read my  
previous
email talking about "ideal" vs "practical"...

If by "ideal" you mean a world where 100% of all computers were
designed by Steve Jobs, you might have a point.

NO NO NO NO NO. READ MY EMAIL. STOP MAKING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WHAT I'M  
TALKING ABOUT.

The most frustrating thing about this thread is everybody keeps  
arguing about what they *assume* I'm talking about without actually  
bothering to read what I'm saying.

quoted

In other words, I was trying to illustrate that
HFS+ isn't wrong, it's just different, and the difference is  
causing the
problem.

And if you want to interoperate with the rest of the world, where at
least count over 92% of computers are NOT running HFS+, then "Thinking
Different" is indeed causing the problem, yes.  And whose fault is  
that?

And if you want to interoperate with the rest of the world, where at  
least count over 92% of computers are running Windows, then using  
another OS is stupid, right? Right? I mean, if everyone else is doing  
it, we should too, shouldn't we?

The whole point of interoperability is that when we communicate, we
have to do so in a uniform and predictable way.  If we can't, the next
best thing is to have protocol translators; but in order to do that,
we must avoid lossy transformations, such as HFS+'s
pseudo-normalization.  (Why, by the way, will not result in a "normal"
form for any glyph which can be encoded with and without a combining
character if said glyph was introduced into Unicode after 1988.  So
you can't even call it a "normalization" algorithm, but just a
pseudo-normalization transformation which is lossy and which DESTROYS
filename information in an irrecoverable way.)

Sure it's normalization, it's just not using one of the standard  
forms. But the form is well-defined.

And yes, protocol translators are a good idea. That's why I thought  
the original suggestion of using a table to map index filenames <-> HFS 
+ filenames sounded like it could work. The only time that should fail  
is if the index contains multiple filenames that HFS+ will treat as a  
single filename. Is there a problem with this approach?

-Kevin Ballard

-- 
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
kevin@sb.org
http://www.tildesoft.com