[darcs-users] darcs and non-ASCII characters

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Juliusz" == Juliusz Chroboczek <Juliusz.Chroboczek at pps.jussieu.fr> writes:

    >> I would say that on Mac OS X (and Linux and pretty much any
    >> modern system with loadable file system drivers) the set of
    >> allowable filenames is nondeterministic.  I think that's the
    >> relevant consideration for Darcs design.

    Juliusz> (s/nondeterministic/system-dependent/)

"Non-deterministic" may not be 100% accurate, but it captures the
problem better than "system-dependent".  As you demonstrated, you can
screw things up simply by doing a cp on a single machine.

    Juliusz> Yes, we have a problem.  David has suggested a
    Juliusz> satisfactory and easy to implement solution: continue
    Juliusz> considering filenames as byte sequences, but allow a
    Juliusz> user-selectable mapping between the local filename
    Juliusz> charset and the byte sequences stored in the repository.

"Go ahead, Pandora, open that box."  I don't think an operation with
poorly defined semantics at best (suppose French developers want to
use ISO-8859-15 for their .po files, and the Russians KOI8-R, is that
allowed?  what's the UI?), possibly non-invertible (eg, if the local
coding is Chinese Big5 and the repository is Unicode, you lose), is
something that should be built into a revision control system.

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