Re: git on MacOSX and files with decomposed utf-8 file names

Kevin Ballard <kevin@xxxxxx> · Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:24:34 -0500

As far as I can tell, the only time you ever run into the problems  
you've described on a filesystem which treats filenames as unicode  
strings (and therefore is free to normalize), are when you're trying  
to interact with a filesystem that treats filenames as sequences of  
bytes.

This doesn't mean treating filenames as unicode strings is wrong, it  
just means that the world would be much better if every filesystem had  
the same behaviour here. It's kinda like the endian issue, except  
there's no simple solution here.

-Kevin Ballard

On Jan 18, 2008, at 12:11 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Peter Karlsson wrote:

But they are not different strings, they are canonically equivalent  
as
far as Unicode is concerned.

Fuck me with a spoon.

Why the hell cannot people see that "equivalent" and "same" are two
totally different meanings.

You cannot do a binary comparison of text to see if two strings are
equivalent.

.. and this is relevant how? They are different strings. Not the same.

Equivalence doesn't matter. Equivalence is *evil*. Equivalence is what
gives us case-insensitive filesystems ("because the names are
equivalent").

Filesystems don't *want* equivalence. They want a much stronger  
exactness
guarantee. Exactly because sometimes the differences matter.

--
Kevin Ballard
http://kevin.sb.org
kevin@xxxxxx
http://www.tildesoft.com

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