Re: Encoding of repository hook parameters

[Philip Martin]
> I think we could have designed Subversion such that external paths,
> like the repository path, were just opaque strings of bytes that get
> passed around without modification--then the encoding would be
> irrelevant.

Finally I understand, and your original question seems to be completely
moot. When you pass a path into a hook script, it has *no way* of
knowing what the path's real encoding is (there *is* a canonical
encoding of the path, but it isn't UTF-8, it's whatever is actually on
the filesystem), so it *has* to assume that the path is already in the
correct encoding. Even if the hook script were given LC_CTYPE, there's
nothing it could do with that information anyway.

Put another way, whatever transformation the subversion server does for
readdir() or open(), it will do the same for popen("hook-script"), so
the hook script may as well assume the path is indeed an opaque bag of
bytes.