Re: OSX, ZFS, UTF8, git - somebody hates me in this list

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, 5 May 2008, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> 
> As I posted in a followup, without twiddling anything, ZFS on OSX
> is case *sensitive*, but apparently still "normalizes", which is causing
> the trip-up.  I'll look to see if there are any parameters I can tweak
> to keep it from doing that, but I doubt it.

Well, the good news is that while the utf-8 normalization is crazy, you're 
pretty unlikely to actually hit it in practice. The git archive has the 
Märchen file on purpose to find these kinds of issues, but it's harmless 
appart from the annoyance.

Yes, some projects will have i18n support that may have files with special 
characters on purpose, and they can cause problems. Not least exactly 
because OS X does all the normalization exactly the wrong way (ie it chose 
the _unusual_ way to do things, expanding strings to their longest format 
rather than their shortest format), but I would expect it to be very rare 
in general, partly because it doesn't really matter what SCM you use to 
track things, and you'll have similar issues if you ever develop anything 
across OS's.

We can fix it. Junio hasn't merged my stupid infrastructure into core git 
yet, and I still don't really care enough or have a OS X box to test on 
(I've got a couple of mac minis, but they run that other OS ;), but we'll 
get the insane OS X crap handled *some* day.

			Linus