On Jan 16, 2008, at 11:38 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
quoted text
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote:
>> 	The only way to argue that normalization is wrong is by providing a
>> good reason to preserve the exact byte sequence, and so far the  
>> only reason
>> I've seen is to help git.
>
> Git doesn't care. Just use the *same* sequence everywhere. Make sure
> something doesn't change it. Because if something changes it, git will
> track it.

The problem is that you don't control the sequence that everybody uses.

See this example:

melo@speed(~)$ uname -a
Linux speed.simplicidade.org 2.6.9-55.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed May 2 14:28:44  
EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
melo@speed(~)$ set | grep LANG
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
melo@speed(~)$ mkdir t
melo@speed(~)$ cd t
melo@speed(~/t)$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
melo@speed(~/t)$ touch á
melo@speed(~/t)$ git-add á
melo@speed(~/t)$ git-commit -m "added a in utf8"
Created initial commit 7a473a2: added a in utf8
  0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  create mode 100644 "\303\241"
melo@speed(~/t)$ export LANG=en_US
melo@speed(~/t)$ touch á
melo@speed(~/t)$ ls -la
total 12
drwxrwxr-x   3 melo melo 4096 Jan 16 23:44 .
drwx--x--x  31 melo melo 4096 Jan 16 23:43 ..
-rw-rw-r--   1 melo melo    0 Jan 16 23:44 á
-rw-rw-r--   1 melo melo    0 Jan 16 23:43 á
drwxrwxr-x   8 melo melo 4096 Jan 16 23:43 .git
melo@speed(~/t)$ git-add á
melo@speed(~/t)$ git-commit -m "added a in iso-latin-1"
Created commit 4282fca: Oláx!
  0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  create mode 100644 "\341"

So two (simulated in this test) users who use different LANG settings  
will be in trouble in no time.

What I take from this conversation is that I have to specify, for  
each project I work on, which encoding we should use, across all  
users, before they start using git with files with accented chars.

The difference I see between us is that if I tell my filesystem that  
I want to name my file with a particular string encoded in X, users  
using encoding Y will be able to read it correctly. I  like my  
filesystem to make that work for me.

Best regards,
-- 
Pedro Melo
Blog: http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/
XMPP ID: melo@simplicidade.org
Use XMPP!


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