Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jul 2009, #01; Mon, 06)

[Alex Riesen <raa.lkml@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 21:17, Linus
Torvalds<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> So right now, my personal opinion is:
>
>  - let's just face the fact that the only sane filename representation is
>   NFC UTF-8. Show filenames as UTF-8 when possible, rather than quoting
>   them.
>
>  - Do case (b) above: add support for converting NFD -> NFC at readdir()
>   time, so that OS X people can use UTF-8 sanely.
>
>  - add a "binary encoding" mode to filesystems that actually use Latin1,
>   just so that if people use Latin1 or Shift-JIS filesystem encodings, we
>   promise that we'll never munge those kinds of names.
>
>  - Maybe we'd make the "binary encoding" (which is effectively existing
>   git behavior) be the default on non-OSX platforms.
>
> but that's just my gut feel from trying to weigh the costs of trying to do
> something more involved against the costs of OS X support and just letting
> crazy encodings exist in their own little worlds. So a development group
> that uses Shift-JIS (or Latin1) would be able to work internally with git
> that way, but would not be able to sanely work with the world at large
> that uses UTF-8.

Maybe we could at least let the user save the encoding of file names
in the tree objects somehow?