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

Kevin Ballard <kevin@xxxxxx> · Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:46:27 -0500

On Jan 21, 2008, at 5:34 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote:

I'm really surprised that, after all of this, you're still horribly
misunderstanding my argument. I never said it was invisible. NEVER.

You said it was invisible when you treat things "as text". Here's the
quote:

	.. when you treat filenames as text, it DOESN'T MATTER if the
	string gets normalized ..

Without ever apparently realizing that "as text" is part of the  
problem in
itself. What is "text" to one person is gibberish to another.

Which is actually a good argument as to why filenames should be  
enforced as UTF-8.

In particular, the biggest reason to not normalize is that you don't  
know
it's text or Unicode in the first place. Which is why git doesn't do  
it.

Sure, I understand why git doesn't do it. I'm saying in a system which  
uses unicode top-to-bottom, which you can create if you're using HFS+  
only, can do it. On HFS+ you know the filename is unicode.

And no, even with filenames you don't know that they are "text".  
People
encode stuff in them. And people don't always use UTF-8.

Again, I was talking about a system that used unicode top-to-bottom.  
On HFS+ you have to use UTF-8 for your filename or it simply won't work.

Of course, you could ask everybody to create OS X-only programs that  
know
that under OS X, you only have a subset of filenames. If so, you're
complaining about the wrong tool. Especially when the whole point of  
the
tool was to be distributed (not to mention coming from an  
environment that
simply doesn't have the same silly limitations OS X has).

So here's a few clues:

- "as text" isn't "as unicode": it may well be Latin1 or EUC-JP or
  something. Yes, it's still used. Git doesn't care, and very  
consciously
  has avoided forcing character sets, even if the *default* (and  
notice
  how it's overridable) commit message encoding may be utf-8.

- In fact, even in unicode, the difference between "identical" and
  "equivalent" strings exists, and even in the standard, unicode
  strings are very much defined to be arbitrary codepoint sequences,  
not
  normalized.

So even for the very specific case of unicode text, it's simply not  
true
that "it doesn't matter if the string gets normalized". The unicode  
spec
itself talks about cases where even canonical normalization makes a
difference.

Search for this quote:

 "Not all processes are required to respect canonical equivalence. For
  example:

   * A function that collects a set of the General_Category values
     present in a string will and should produce a different value for
     <angstrom sign, semicolon> than for <A, combining ring above,  
greek
     question mark>, even though they are canonically equivalent.
   * A function that does a binary comparison of strings will also  
find
     these two sequences different."

and notice that first case. Even things that are *very*much* aware of
Unicode text do actually have cases where canonical equivalence  
doesn't
mean crud.

I find it amusing that you keep arguing against having git treat  
filenames as unicode when, if you had actually taken my advice and  
read my previous email talking about "ideal" vs "practical", you'd  
realize that I was not suggesting git should. I was simply describing  
why having the filesystem specifically treat filenames as utf-8 isn't  
a problem when the entire system is unicode-aware, and thus showing  
how the problems that are cropping up in git aren't because the  
filesystem treats filenames as unicode, but rather because the  
filesystem treats filenames differently than other filesystems. In  
other words, I was trying to illustrate that HFS+ isn't wrong, it's  
just different, and the difference is causing the problem.

-Kevin Ballard

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

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