Consequences for use of hg for other applications than SCM was Re: German umlauts in file names

Marko Kaening mk362 at mch.osram.de
Mon Jun 23 03:03:30 CDT 2008


> > I worked now for 4 years with svn and NEVER had a problem 
> > with all my German transcodings!
> Let a user with an 8-bit-coding which does NOT include the 
> non-ASCII-characters you have used (umlauts) work with your repo. 
> Umlauts can't be transcoded on his system. What does SVN do now?

I do not know what SVN would do in such case. And to be honest, I don't 
care, because big parts of my repos are just for keeping history for 
myself. I know that I won't change to other systems like WXP (possibly 
Vista at some stage) and Linux. I don't need to care about other 
encodings, since they'll never come up.

I know that I abuse svn for something it wasn't initially made for - just 
keeping my daily work with all imaginable content versioned - instead of 
solely source code (which is there as well)!

All what I was saying is that I saw over the years that subversion always 
did the job for me. Due to its transcoding I could check out my "sick" 
filesystem on W2k, WXP and linux.

I know that CVS doesn't do transcoding either!

I understood from this discussion, that this issue is simply not 
implementable in a safe way (for mercurial). I have to accept that.

Since I am not a SVN professional - just a dumb user - I can't explain how 
SVN circumvents these issues, but I'll perhaps find that out on their list 
sometime in the future.

For now I'll check out whether SVK offers me this functionality. For some 
reason I have the feeling, that it might complicate things even more...

So, in the end, it might happen, that I return to mercurial and just live 
with the non-existent transcoding, making it impossible to check out to 
linux, but have the great features of hg on all my windows clients. :)

Thanks everybody for your patience with me! :)


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