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The git files aren't supposed to be seen by a human being. What you're suggesting would mean that a Korean user saving a file on their desktop and naming it in
by klausa 4y ago
The git files aren't supposed to be seen by a human being.
What you're suggesting would mean that a Korean user saving a file on their desktop and naming it in Korean would in turn see the filename turn into garbage, which, I hope we can all agree, is not a reasonable suggestion.
- gpderetta 4y agoOf course if the file-name is correctly decodeable in the user preferred encoding (hopefully UTF-8) it should be shown as such. But giving up on supposedly malformed filenames shouldn't be an option for robust software.
- CorrectHorseBat 4y agoWhy though? What do you lose by forcing utf-8 at the filesystem level?
- gpderetta 4y agoCompatibility with a few decades of data and with other systems.
- eviks 4y agoBut the future is longer than a few decades, so why extend the mistake further?
- sacnoradhq 4y agoBecause change costs way more to than you think: maybe billions of dollars and impacting billions of users. Creating 2 different systems carries risks: it has a learning curve, a support cost, and breaks everything that came before. Perhaps, in a utopian green field, we redo a systems language, a portable systems API, and a common operating system with a compatibility layer to the old way on top.
- eviks 4y agoChange has already partially happened since there is no one single filesystem with one behavior. Not changing impacts many more users (all the future billions) and costs even more: the learning/support/etc. is all there, and it's harder to learn about a buggy system since you have more papercuts Also, it doesn't break everything, we're not living in a dystopia
- actionfromafar 4y agoThis is all true. We should also fix global warming, it's the same kind of problem. Massive investments now or even more massive losses tomorrow.
- gpderetta 4y ago1) Not everybody, or even a majority, agrees that the current state is a mistake 2) Change what to what? There are multiple filesystems systems (and OSs) with different and sometimes incompatible filename encodings. Who picks the winner? 3) There is irony on dropping backward compat and requiring UTF-8, an econding whose claim to fame is backward compatibility with ASCII based systems (and not coincidentally was designed by UNIX Elder Ones)
- eviks 4y agoI was responding to your specific argument ignoring the bigger future for the smaller past, not sure how the broader questions about what others think etc is relevant 1) so? That will be true for anything 2) sequence of bytes to human encoding. Who picked the loser??? This would similarly be some unidentifiable group of people. You can start by picking the winner for yourself, even at a conceptual level 3) no irony, sequence of bytes is not ASCII