Re: non-US-ASCII file names (e.g. Hiragana) on Windows

[Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@googlemail.com>]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Thomas Singer <thomas.singer@syntevo.com> wrote:
> Johannes Sixt wrote:
>> Thomas Singer schrieb:
>>> I'm quite surprised, that -- as I
>>> understand you -- msys-Git (or Git at all?) is not able to handle all
>>> characters (aka unicode) at the same time. I expected it would be better
>>> than older tools, e.g. SVN.
>>
>> This has been discussed at length here and in the msysgit mailing list.
>> Git expects that the file system returns file names with the same byte
>> sequence that git used to create a file. On Windows, this works only as
>> long as you do not switch the codepage.
>
> Now you confuse me: is this a problem of Windows, Git using a less capable
> Windows-API call or is there no unicode-capable API call to list file names
> on Windows? I ask myself how Java does it in its internals, finally it
> (also) consists of a C-base, I guess.
>

Git uses the 8-bit file APIs, and Windows doesn't support setting
UTF-8 as the locale. Some work have been done in msysGit to use
_wopen() and friends instead, but AFAIK it's not completed. See the
branch called "work/utf-filenames" in
git://repo.or.cz/git/mingw/4msysgit.git if you are interested in
helping to complete it.

-- 
Erik "kusma" Faye-Lund