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

[Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 09:45:40PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sun, 20 Jan 2008, Mike Hommey wrote:
> > 
> > But there is no way to know whether 'ä' in a document is the Finnish 'ä'
> > or a 'ä' from, say, German, that sorts after 'a'.
> 
> ... without knowing the locale. Correct.
> 
> That's why sorting is locale-dependent, even in Unicode. And why you 
> should always sort using the *combined* character, not think that you can 
> sort by decompsed sequence.

That said, the locale doesn't necessarily express the language in which
the document is written. It's easy enough to read documents that are not
written in your native language on the net. That's already what we are both
doing right now. Fortunately, HTTP and HTML have ways to indicate the
language in which a document is written in, but that leaves out plain
mail, for instance. 

That said, the "decomposed" version of UTF-8 has nice side effects on
OSX, with UTF-8 encoded RockRidge ISO-9660 volumes (with or without
Joliet ; OSX will use RockRidge by default when it's there), for instance.

Mike