Bazaar does not support umlauts in file names on Mac OS X

[Martin Pool]

2009/11/30 Martin (gzlist) <gzlist at googlemail.com>:
> On 28/11/2009, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
>>
>> So in the beginning... we did translate to NFC internally from the Mac
>> filesystem. With the idea that most other platforms should only create
>> NFC, and thus it was obvious what you would end up with.
>>
>> Except it turned out that Japanese windows creates wide () characters,
>> which turn out not to be NFC. (So the expectation that internally we
>> would always use NFC means that you need to translate on more than just
>> Mac...)
>
> This sounds wrong, the fullwidth ascii variants are only a problem
> with NFKC, they're untouched by NFC.
>
> Isn't the real problem a clash of user expectations? People don't like
> filenames being unexpectedly changed, and they also don't like having
> the set of valid names reduced. Canonicalisation fixes the mac
> problem, but makes unix people unhappy because they can't have a files
> named both 'e\xcc\x81' and '\xc3\xa9' (they're still complaining about
> not being allowed backslashes), let alone being told a file had been
> renamed from one thing to something else visually identical.

We do take the position that filenames are unicode.  I think it would
be a better tradeoff, at least given that general approach, to
disallow confusable unicode filenames than to fail to handle unicode
on os x so much of the time.

So there's no architectural reason we can't do it, it just seems to be
a nontrivial amount of work.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>