On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 02:05:51PM -0500, Kevin Ballard wrote: > You're right, but it doesn't have to treat it as a binary stream at the > level I care about. I mean, no matter what you do at some level the string > is evaluated as a binary stream. For our purposes, just redefine the > hashing algorithm to hash all equivalent strings the same, and you can > implement that by using SHA1 on a particular encoding of the string. That's horribly broken, for a couple of reasons. First of all, changing the hash algorithm breaks compatibility with existing repositories; sure, you can try to guess what will least likely break existing repository (which won't be the native MacOSX normalization algorithm, since it's more likely the combined character will likely be used on other environments), but there's still no guarantee there aren't filenames that use some other form of byte-string for the filename. Secondly, the hash algorithm would not be stable. Unicode is not static, and new characters can get added that may be composable, and thus would be normalized differently. This is one of the reasons why Unicode is so horribly broken as a standard. It was originally created by representatives from the printing world that were horribly clueless about what was needed with respect to canonicalization representation, so they compromised allowed both forms, not realizing what a massive f*ckup this would cause later on. So people have over the years piled kludges on top of kludges in order to make Unicode "work". So we can't blame all of the craziness on the MacOS designers, although they have seen to have been very creative about how to take a bad situation and make it worse.... - Ted - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
