From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Design for pathname encoding gitattribute [RESEND]
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:26:43 -0800
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References: <20080122050215.DE198200A2@wilber.wgtn.cat-it.co.nz>
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Cc: git@vger.kernel.org, Peter Karlsson <peter@softwolves.pp.se>,
	Mark Junker <mjscod@web.de>,
	Pedro Melo <melo@simplicidade.org>,
	Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>,
	Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>,
	Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>,
	Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>
To: Sam Vilain <sam.vilain@catalyst.net.nz>
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In-Reply-To: <20080122050215.DE198200A2@wilber.wgtn.cat-it.co.nz> (Sam
	Vilain's message of "Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:41:59 +1300")
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Sam Vilain <sam.vilain@catalyst.net.nz> writes:

> Some projects may like to enforce a particular encoding is used for
> all filenames in the repository.  Within the UTF-8 encoding, there are
> four normal forms (see http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/), any of which
> may be a reasonable repository format choice.  Additionally, some
> filesystems may have a single encoding that they support when writing
> local filenames.  To support this, iconv and a normalization library
> must have the information they need to perform the correct conversion.

Isn't there a chicken-and-egg problem?  The attributes are by
nature per-path, and you need to match the pathname string with
a pattern to decide which attribute definition to apply to a
given path.  Before knowing what encoding the pathname you have
just read from readdir(3), how would you match that pathname
with the pattern in the gitattributes file?

I can buy the .git/config (and an in-tree .git-encoding,
perhaps), though.