Re: Cross-Platform Version Control

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

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >   DON'T DO THAT.
>
> What could be proper solution to that, if you do not accept social
> rather than technical restriction?

Let's say strong checks for case sensitivity clashes, leading/trailing
dots, utf-8 encoding maladies, etc switched on by default. And note
that to be user-friendly you want most of those checks at 'add' time.

 If we don't like a particular FS, or we think it is messing up our
utf-8 filenames, say it up-front, at clone and checkout time. For
example, if the checkout has files with interesting utf-8 names, it'd
be reasonable to check for filename mangling.

Some things are hard or impossible to prevent - the utf-8 encoding
maladies of OSX for example. But it may be detectable on checkout.

In short, play on the defensive, for the benefit of users who are not
kernel developers.

It will piss off kernel & git developers and slow some operations
somewhat. It will piss off oldtimers like me. But I'll say git config
--global core.trainingwheels no and life will be good.

It may be - as Jeff King points out - a matter of a polished git
porcelain. We've seen lots of porcelains, but no smooth user-targetted
porcelain yet.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff@gmail.com
 martin@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff