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

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:58:40 -0800

Wincent Colaiuta <[email-masked]> writes:

> If this is really just a platform-specific hack, can we use platform- 
> specific code to do the normalization?

Unfortunately, I do not think this can be a platform-specific
hack.

If a project wants to be usable on both sane and insane
filesystems, people on platforms whose filesystems treat "foo"
and "Foo" as two distinct pathnames (and "Ma<UMLAUT>rchen" and
"M<A-with-UMLAUT>rchen" as two distinct ones) need to be
prevented from creating both in their tree objects at the same
time.  Once you create two pathnames xt_connmark.c and
xt_CONNMARK.c in the same tree object in your project, people on
case insensitive filesystems cannot work with your project (you
cannot check out the kernel source tree and work on it on vfat).

This is exactly the same logic as making autocrlf=safe (or at
least 'input') the default for projects that people need to work
both on UNIX and Windows, which Steffen Prohaska has been
adovocating in another thread.