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

["Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>]

On Jan 24, 2008 6:19 AM, Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> wrote:
> I don't get why you're still calling it corruption

Because in a modern Internet-aware world, whoever designs a FS needs
to acknowledge that they will need to store files from other systems
that have other assumptions. That is, if they want to interoperate.

As you noted not long ago, it is a serious problem if an HFS+
partition is shared over NFS. If you look at all the apps that have
problems with this aspect of HFS+ , they are all apps that transfer
files over the network over diverse protocols. That's why it's a
problem with git, because the files may be coming from a different
machine, running any arbitrary OS that git supports.

In such scenario, can you understand why everyone is saying that HFS+
and the VFS should not mangle names, even if it makes sense to some
use cases under OSX? And do you understand why the same applies to
git, being a network-sharing-oriented app?

So -- if OSX was doing things to make it easier for users to find
matching files at the Finder level, that'd be _fine_. But the FS has
to deal with a lot more variety than that. So this is a bad design
decision -- perhaps less obvious under OS8/9, but completely
disastrous with a network OS such as OSX. Call it "different" if you
want, but that's a euphemism for "wrong".

cheers,



m