On Jan 16, 2008, at 8:16 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> wrote:
On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote:
I'm speaking as a user, and as such, I shouldn't even have to know
that it's
possible to write the same character in multiple different ways.
The thing is, you seem to argue that what OS X does helps you as the
user.
But you are arguing based on incorrect assumptions.
First off, we've had years and years and years of usage of non-
corrupting
filesystems (pretty much every UNIX OS around since day 1, and many
other
OS's too), and it's simply not true that it's a problem. You see the
filename in the file dialog, and you open it, and you're done. OS X
isn't
any "easier" in this regard.
In fact, this whole thread comes from the fact that the OS X choice
that
you *think* is easier, is in fact not easier at all. It's not easier
for
the user, it's not easier for the application programmer, and the
really
sad part is that it's very much *not* easier for OS X itself either
(ie
they had to literally write extra code with nasty tables to do it,
and it
really does hurt them in performance and complexity).
And _that_ is why the OS X situation is so sad. Apple literally added
extra code to make things slower and more complex *and* harder to use
reliably.
Does it show up in normal behaviour? Of course not. You'd probably
never
see it in real life outside of test-suites. People simply don't even
tend
to use filenames outside of US-ASCII, and when they do use them, input
methods really *do* tend to do the normalization for you.
But when it comes to automation (which is what computers are all
about),
the OS X choice is literally the wrong one. And there's no _upside_.
It's
all downside. Which is why it's so stupid.
I bet it only exists because OS X engineers didn't really even think
about
it, and they just assumed that "normalization is helpful". They took
your
stance - thinking it was worth it, without ever really thinking it
through.
Linus
I believe it exists because HFS+ was created at a time when the Mac
was moving from a multi-encoding world (which was a nightmare) to a
Unicode world and they wanted to remove ambiguity in filenames. But I
wasn't around when they made this decision so this is just a guess.
-Kevin Ballard
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