Subject: Re: Git, Mac OS X and German special characters

From: Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 May 2010 10:50:31 +0200

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason venit, vidit, dixit 20.05.2010 10:34:
> On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 07:26, Matthias Moeller
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> I have been searching the web for help and found lengthy discussions
>> which state that this is a common problem of the HFS+ filesystem.
>> What I did not find was a solution to this problem. Is there a solution
>> to this problem?
> 
> Is this problem particular to Git, or do you also get it if you
> e.g. rsync from the Linux box to the Mac OS X box?
> 
>> #       "U\314\210bersicht.xls"
> 
> You probably have to configure your shell on OSX to render UTF-8
> correctly. It's just showing the raw escaped byte sequence instead of
> a character there.
> 
> There isn't anything wrong with OSX in this case, filename encoding on
> any POSIX system is only done by convention. You'll find that you have
> similar problems on Linux if you encode filename in Big5 or
> UTF-32.
> 
> Linux will happily accept it, but your shell / other applications will
> render it as unknown goo because they expect UTF-8.

No, the problem with git status is not the display. Matthias' problem is
that git status reports a tracked file as untracked. The reason is that
on HFS+, you create a file with name A and get a file with name B, where
A and B are different representations of the same name. There seems to
be no way to reliably detect which one HFS+ uses.

Michael