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

Lars Noschinski [off-list ref] writes:

* Peter Krefting [off-list ref] [09-03-03 12:54]:

quoted

Lars Noschinski:

quoted

Changing the filename (on checkout), so that the user sees an Ü regardless of 
his or her locale (instead of an \0xDC, which only resolves to an Ü on 
latin-1) would be an absolutely broken concept here.

Why would it? It is my view as a user on my files that define how file names 
are looked upon. If I have three machines, one Linux box using a iso8859-1 
locale, an OS X box (where, I would believe, file APIs use UTF-8, someone 
please correct me if I'm wrong), and a Windows box (which uses UTF-16 on the 
file system layer, but does provide compatibility functions that use char 
pointers), and create a file on each of these called "Ü.txt" (which would be 
the sequence "DC 2E 74 78 74" on the Linux box, "C3 9C 2E 74 78 74" (or 
probably something else since I believe OS X decomposes the string) on the OS X 
box and "00DC 002E 0074 0078 0074" on the Windows box, I see these three file 
names as equal.

Because a function in the source code refers to (e.g.) "DC 2E 74 78 74",
not "C3 9C 2E 74 78 74" nor "00DC 0024 0074 0078 0074". And it does so
regardless of the locale.

The only actual language I know where I've seen people use non-ascii names for
referenced files, i.e. classes, is Java and there you specify the encoding to
the compiler. Class names are not byte sequences there. XML files are another
case where references files are defined in unicode. I assume this applies to
C# and other modern languages too.

The file name may look funny depending on your locale, but if you rename
the file to fit your local enconding, it would not work.

In the Java case, you /have/ to "rename" or the build will break. Build systems like Ant
or Maven require you to "rename" too regardless of what you build. A C Git clone
will produce unbuildable code, but JGit will produce a working one for unicode
aware systems and documentation, the case where unicode filenames are more common
than in source, will look good.

-- robin

PS. I readded the people you forgot to Cc