Re: File name completion on Mac OS X with German umlauts

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Nikolaj Schumacher <n_schumacher@web.de>
> Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:44:03 +0100
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> GNU/Linux supports BOTH representations.  For instance, if you rsync
> "rückerstattung" from a Linux machine to a Mac machine and back, you
> will end up with 2 files named "rückerstattung".  Each will have a
> different representation to the machine but will look indistinguishable
> to the user.  Completing will work nicely on one, but have the very same
> problems on the other...
> 
> I don't think either OS is to blame.  It's an app (or maybe string
> library) problem.

It is only a ``problem'' if you accept the view that no two files in
the same directory can have names that are pronounced identically.  We
are used to think that, but only because of the particular design
decisions built into the popular filesystems.  However, this design is
by no means an axiom, and in fact we people already know how to deal
with situations where two different entities have the same name.  One
example is movies.  In fact, even case-sensitive filesystems already
present a similar problem, because README and readme are the same
word.

In other words, the name as pronounced does not have to be a unique
descriptor of a file.  There's plenty of other attributes (e.g., the
inode) to distinguish them.