Re: OS X and umlauts in file names

I've did following:

 toms-mac-mini:git-umlauts tom$ ls
 Überlänge.txt
 toms-mac-mini:git-umlauts tom$ git status
 # On branch master
 #
 # Initial commit
 #
 # Changes to be committed:
 #   (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)
 #
  #	new file:   "U\314\210berla\314\210nge.txt"
 #
 toms-mac-mini:git-umlauts tom$ git stage "U\314\210berla\314\210nge.txt"
 fatal: pathspec 'U\314\210berla\314\210nge.txt' did not match any files

Note, that I copy-pasted the file name which 'git status' showed to the
stage command. IMHO, this should work, especially, because different people
said Git would treat the file name as byte-array without interpreting it in
some kind.

From the user with the German OS X (for which the staging is said to work),
I've got the output of 'env' and hence also tried

 export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8

before doing the above steps, but with the same results. :(

-- 
Tom


Daniel Barkalow wrote:

On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Thomas Singer wrote:

quoted

I'm on an English OS X 10.6.2 and I created a sample file with umlauts in
its name (Überlänge.txt). When I try to stage the file in the terminal, I
can't complete the file name by typing the Ü and hitting the tab key, but I
can complete it by typing an U and hitting the tab key.

You've already got a bug before involving git at all. You create a 
file "Überlänge.txt", but OS X writes "U:berla:nge.txt" (typing the 
combining character umlaut as : so that you can see the difference), and 
the directory listing doesn't contain any files that start with Ü, so the 
terminal already can't find the file you created. Obviously, git is going 
to have all the problems that the OS-provided readline library has, and 
you're not going to be able to get predictable results in any case where 
user-supplied filenames are compared with directory listings.

Part of the problem is that OS X does a canonicalization that is not what 
anybody else does, so you hit the problem every single time, but the 
fundamental issue is that there isn't any way to tell, when you create a 
file, what name that file will be listed under.

Note that this isn't a matter of characters to byte sequences. OS X 
actually uses different characters for the filename in its listings than 
you've used.

If there's a difference between German and English versions, I suspect 
that it's actually that you're not using a German keyboard with a key 
that, under OS X, produces the two-character sequence U:, but using some 
method that produces the single character Ü. I'd guess that your SmartGit 
problem is that Java is converting the U: that the user typed into Ü, and 
passing it to the OS, which turns it back into U: and then doesn't list 
the file that Java thinks the user asked for.

	-Daniel
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