Skip to content
  • Torsten Bögershausen's avatar
    git on Mac OS and precomposed unicode · 76759c7d
    Torsten Bögershausen authored and Junio C Hamano's avatar Junio C Hamano committed
    
    
    Mac OS X mangles file names containing unicode on file systems HFS+,
    VFAT or SAMBA.  When a file using unicode code points outside ASCII
    is created on a HFS+ drive, the file name is converted into
    decomposed unicode and written to disk. No conversion is done if
    the file name is already decomposed unicode.
    
    Calling open("\xc3\x84", ...) with a precomposed "Ä" yields the same
    result as open("\x41\xcc\x88",...) with a decomposed "Ä".
    
    As a consequence, readdir() returns the file names in decomposed
    unicode, even if the user expects precomposed unicode.  Unlike on
    HFS+, Mac OS X stores files on a VFAT drive (e.g. an USB drive) in
    precomposed unicode, but readdir() still returns file names in
    decomposed unicode.  When a git repository is stored on a network
    share using SAMBA, file names are send over the wire and written to
    disk on the remote system in precomposed unicode, but Mac OS X
    readdir() returns decomposed unicode to be compatible with its
    behaviour on HFS+ and VFAT.
    
    The unicode decomposition causes many problems:
    
    - The names "git add" and other commands get from the end user may
      often be precomposed form (the decomposed form is not easily input
      from the keyboard), but when the commands read from the filesystem
      to see what it is going to update the index with already is on the
      filesystem, readdir() will give decomposed form, which is different.
    
    - Similarly "git log", "git mv" and all other commands that need to
      compare pathnames found on the command line (often but not always
      precomposed form; a command line input resulting from globbing may
      be in decomposed) with pathnames found in the tree objects (should
      be precomposed form to be compatible with other systems and for
      consistency in general).
    
    - The same for names stored in the index, which should be
      precomposed, that may need to be compared with the names read from
      readdir().
    
    NFS mounted from Linux is fully transparent and does not suffer from
    the above.
    
    As Mac OS X treats precomposed and decomposed file names as equal,
    we can
    
     - wrap readdir() on Mac OS X to return the precomposed form, and
    
     - normalize decomposed form given from the command line also to the
       precomposed form,
    
    to ensure that all pathnames used in Git are always in the
    precomposed form.  This behaviour can be requested by setting
    "core.precomposedunicode" configuration variable to true.
    
    The code in compat/precomposed_utf8.c implements basically 4 new
    functions: precomposed_utf8_opendir(), precomposed_utf8_readdir(),
    precomposed_utf8_closedir() and precompose_argv().  The first three
    are to wrap opendir(3), readdir(3), and closedir(3) functions.
    
    The argv[] conversion allows to use the TAB filename completion done
    by the shell on command line.  It tolerates other tools which use
    readdir() to feed decomposed file names into git.
    
    When creating a new git repository with "git init" or "git clone",
    "core.precomposedunicode" will be set "false".
    
    The user needs to activate this feature manually.  She typically
    sets core.precomposedunicode to "true" on HFS and VFAT, or file
    systems mounted via SAMBA.
    
    Helped-by: default avatarJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTorsten Bögershausen <tboegi@web.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
    76759c7d