Re: Git, Mac OS X and German special characters

On 20 May 2010 10:50, Michael J Gruber [off-list ref] wrote:

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason venit, vidit, dixit 20.05.2010 10:34:

quoted

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 07:26, Matthias Moeller
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

I have been searching the web for help and found lengthy discussions
which state that this is a common problem of the HFS+ filesystem.
What I did not find was a solution to this problem. Is there a solution
to this problem?

Is this problem particular to Git, or do you also get it if you
e.g. rsync from the Linux box to the Mac OS X box?

quoted

#       "U\314\210bersicht.xls"

You probably have to configure your shell on OSX to render UTF-8
correctly. It's just showing the raw escaped byte sequence instead of
a character there.

There isn't anything wrong with OSX in this case, filename encoding on
any POSIX system is only done by convention. You'll find that you have
similar problems on Linux if you encode filename in Big5 or
UTF-32.

Linux will happily accept it, but your shell / other applications will
render it as unknown goo because they expect UTF-8.

No, the problem with git status is not the display. Matthias' problem is
that git status reports a tracked file as untracked. The reason is that
on HFS+, you create a file with name A and get a file with name B, where
A and B are different representations of the same name. There seems to
be no way to reliably detect which one HFS+ uses.

Judging by the example given the problem is that HFS+ decomposes
Unicode file names into latin1+combining characters instead of using
normalized utf8.

This implies that if the utf8 is normalized first using canonical
unicode normalization rules (to eliminate the combining character)
that it can then be compared.

Yves

-- 
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"