Re: Problems with accents in filenames

Vincent Lefevre wrote:

>I haven't changed the files. So, this is a bug in Subversion. Any
>program should know that the user may use different locales when
>he wants. Locales are not something linked to the system itself,
>but a user choice, local for each process (different users may
>choose different locales, and different processes may run with
>different locales, even for the same user).
>
>
I'm going to try one last time, and I'll do my utmost to restrain my
fllammatory urges.

There is no convention on Unix about how the filesystem encodes file
names. Typically, the bytes that an application send to the VFS layer
are what gets written to disk. And the exact encoding of the characters
in a file name depends on the current locale.

Yes, different users can use different locales, and the same user can
use different locales at different times. As you noticed, this will
typically cause problems if the locales used are incompatible (such as
in your example, where UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 are incompatible for code
positions above \x7f). The bytes stored in the directory structure on
disk are always interpreted in terms of the current locale settings.

This is what you're seing, and it's not a Subversion bug, it's a fact of
life on Unix.

I agree it would be nice if Unix file systems stored character data in a
consistent encoding (such as, for example, NTFS on Windows, which uses
UTF-16), but things simply don't work that way. Please stop trying to
convince us that they do.

-- 
Brane Čibej   <brane_at_xbc.nu>   http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
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