[Drizzle-discuss] UTF-8/File Systems

[Russel Winder]

On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 11:35 +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> On 19 February 2010 11:22, Tim Penhey <tim at penhey.net> wrote:
> > Does Bazaar have a known issue with UTF-8 filenames?
> 
> If you search for bugs tagged 'unicode' you may find some.
> 
> The main problem is on mac os x where the os 'helpfully' rewrites
> filenames into a normal form.  So mkdir(a) does not guarantee that a
> exists, only that something with a name representing the same
> characters as a exists.
> 
> The other thing people tend to hit is that bzr insists filenames be
> valid in the OS filesystem encoding: if it's declared to be utf-8 then
> the names must actually be utf-8.
> 
> If they want to file or vote for a bug please do.

My experience is that there is only a problem for Mac OS X when the
filesystem is created as case insensitive -- for case sensitive
filestores, there is no problem.  Sadly the Mac OS X default is case
insensitive so the problem exists for more or less all Mac OS X
isntallations.

The folk over at the Unison project (the filestore synchronization tool)
have tackled this successfully and are able to process UTF-8 encoded
files correctly between Mac OS X and Ubuntu.  Of course their code is
written in OCaml so it can't just be used as is, but the algorithms are
known, and known to work.


-- 
Russel.
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Dr Russel Winder      Partner
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