Re: [RFC PATCH] Windows: Assume all file names to be UTF-8 encoded.

Thomas Rast:

Have you thought about all the consequences this would have for the *nix 
people here? [*]

Yeah. It will fix problems trying to check out a Git repository created by 
me in a iso8859-1 locale on a machine using a utf-8 locale, where both ends 
would like to have a file named "Ü".

Or, hopefully, a careful adoption of this on Windows won't affect Unixes and 
other systems with pre-Unicode APIs at all, since the Windows code would be 
in the "compat" directory.

you're still in a world of hurt when trying to check out such paths under 
a locale (or whatever setting might control this new encoding logic) that 
does not support the whole range of UTF-8.

Yeah. That would be a case similar to the casing problem on Windows.

With backwards compatibility it's even worse as you're suddenly imposing 
extra restrictions on what a valid filename in the repository must look 
like.

Indeed. It is unfortunate that this wasn't properly specified to start with. 
It's mostly a minor issue since *most* people will not use non-ASCII file 
names. At least for most of the kind of projects that Git have attracted so 
far, so the problem is not that big. The problem is if Git is to attract 
"the masses". Especially on Windows, where file names using non-ASCII are 
common, this needs to be addressed eventually.

[*] I'm _extremely_ tempted to write "people using non-broken OSes", but 
let's pretend to be neutral for a second.

In most cases, I would most definitely agree with you on calling it that, 
but when it comes to Unicode support, Windows is one of the least broken 
OSes (with Symbian being my favourite).

-- 
\\// Peter - http://www.softwolves.pp.se/