Re: Cross-Platform Version Control

[Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 10:58:17PM +0300, Esko Luontola wrote:
>
> What about if some disorganized project has people committing with many  
> different encodings? Should we allow it, that a directory has the names  
> of some files using one encoding, and the names of other files using  
> another encoding? Or should we force the whole repository to use the  
> same encoding?

The whole repository should have the same encoding internally. Anything
else will be too complex and too slow... Have you seen any file system
where file names would be stored in different encodings? And Git does
far more operation on file names than a file system does. So, it is
clearly to me that the whole repository should have a single encoding.

Now, I don't think that you will find many open source projects that use
non-ASCII in file names. Moreover, most Linux users are either use UTF-8
already or switch to it in the near future. Mac OS X uses UTF-8 (though
there is a problem with decomposed characters, but Linus posted a
possible solution). So, the only platform were non-ASCII characters may
be interesting to Git users and that does not support UTF-8 is Windows.
AFAIK, Cygwin 1.7 has UTF-8 support. So, it is mostly a problem for
msysGit... Though adding support for legacy encodings can help to some
degree, it means that every system call involving a file name will go
through UTF-8 <-> LEGACY_ENC <-> UTF-16LE conversion. IMHO, having a
legacy encoding involved is far from the best possible solution; but
to avoid that, you need to change MSYS to be able to work with UTF-8.
(I have never looked at MSYS myself, but I suspect it may be not easy).


Dmitry