Subject: Re: OS X and umlauts in file names

From: Thomas Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:31:22 +0100

I agree, that getting it done correctly could be a long and hard (maybe
incompatible) way. Neglecting the problem or blaming platform specific
"anomalies" does not help to solve that serious real-world problem for the
end-user. IMHO, telling a user to not use non-US-ASCII characters in file
names to stay platform-independent seems not to be state-of-the-art and
would exclude a lot of users world-wide. Finally, everyone would expect Git
to be better than CVS, also at this point.

But what about getting it working "somehow" on OS X in a few minutes? What
should I do to be able to stage/commit/work with files containing umlauts in
their name on my English OS X (by specifying the file names) as it seems to
work magically on a German OS X? Is this topic already /documented/
somewhere (I couldn't find something)?

Thanks in advance,
Tom

Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Thomas Singer wrote:
> 
>> Basically, getting it "somehow" to work on OS X is just one minor step. 
>> IMHO Git should standardize on file names in the repository and do the 
>> platform-specific conversion independent of any locale setting, if 
>> needed.
> 
> That is contrary to the design of Git which honors content (byte-wise!) as 
> much as possible, and treats file names very much as content.
> 
> There were beginnings of supporting OSX' brain-damaged filename mangling, 
> but an obnoxious OSX fan worked very hard on trying to defend the OSX 
> design and to decry Git's respect for the raw bytes on this list, so hard 
> that even the nicest developers had no fun working on this issue anymore.
> 
> This little background may help you understand why there is no solution 
> implemented in Git yet.  And maybe quite a few developers are reluctant to 
> discuss the issue and possible solutions due to said sad story, too.
> 
> Ciao,
> Dscho
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