Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 6:51 AM, John Tapsell <johnflux@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Unfortunately not, because for some absolutely crazy reason > > Bzzt. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/50830 I do not think the message gives enough information on the issue, as "a pathname is a slash separated sequence of path components terminated with a NUL, and a path component is an uninterpreted sequence of bytes excluding NUL and slash" is simply a UNIX tradition the original git design took as _given_, so the "some absolutely crazy reason" comment does not even deserve refuting. There is _no_ reason, crazy or otherwise. If you start from "a pathname is an uninterpreted sequence of bytes" tradition, it is a design parameter and "how things are", and you simply do not argue with them. And the message you quoted doesn't, either. Side note: I am not saying that we should not ever change that particular design parameter. I am just explaining why 50830 is not a good counterargument to quote against the "some absolutely crazy reason" accusation. > And, as always, patches welcomed. Before patches, you need a sound design and justification. At least you need to consider the following (the early ones are easier): - Do we unify them to some canonical encoding internally and do the matching in the canonical space? What's the internal representation (presumably UTF-8)? - How should a user tell the pathname conversion rules between the internal repreasentation and the filesystem representation to git? A config variable per a repository? - How should this interact with patch+apply dataflow (including "rebase" without -i/-m)? Should pathnames in diffs be in canonical form? - How should this interact with case challenged and/or unicode corrupting filesystems such as NTFS and HFSplus whose creat(), readdir(), and stat() contradict with each other? - What should happen when the pathname in the canonical representation recorded in the history cannot be externalized on a particular filesystem? Does it gracefully degenerate and give some escape hatch, and if so how? -- 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
