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

[Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 04:07:27PM -0500, Kevin Ballard wrote:
> 
> Again, I've specified many times that I'm talking about canonical  
> equivalence.
> 
> And yes, HFS+ does normalization, it just doesn't use NFD. It uses a  
> custom variant. I fail to see how this is a problem.

If you think that HFS+ does normalization then you apparently have no
idea of what the term "normalization" means. Have you? But if you
don't know what is "normalization" then you cannot really know what
canonical equivalence means.

> >
> >I don't say they do that without *any* reason, but I suppose all
> >Apple developers in the Copland project had some reasons for they
> >did, but the outcome was not very good...
> 
> Stupid engineers don't get to work on developing new filesystems.

Assigning someone to work on a new filesystem does not make him
suddenly smart. As to that stupid engineers don't get to work,
it is like saying there is no stupid engineers at all. There are
plenty evidence to contrary. And when management is disastrous
then most idiots with big mouth and little capacity to produce
any useful does get assignment to develop new features, while
those who can actually solve problems are assigned to fix the
next build, because the only thing that this management worries
about how to survive another year or another months...

> And  
> Copland didn't fail because of stupid engineers anyway. If I had to  
> blame someone, I'd blame management.

But if the code was so good then why was most of that code thrown away
later when management was changed? Still bad management?

> 
> >>The only information you lose when doing canonical normalization is
> >>what the original byte sequence was.
> >
> >Not true. You lose the original sequence of *characters*.
> 
> Which is only a problem if you care about the byte sequence, which is  
> kinda the whole point of my argument.

Byte sequences are not an issue here. If the filesystem used UTF-16 to
store filenames, that would NOT cause this problem, because characters
would be the same even though bytes stored on the disk were different.
So, what you actually lose here is the original sequence of *characters*.

Dmitry