Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: non utf-8 filenames

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Graydon Hoare wrote:
> There's an important difference to examine here:
>
>   - There are file names that, while not presently encoded as UTF-8,
>     can be faithfully transformed to and from Unicode (and thus UTF-8).
>     These are very common -- several euc, koi, 8859-x, gb and jis
>     standards fall in this category -- but they are all supposed to
>     map bijectively to Unicode codepoints. We support these.
>
>   - There are file names that cannot be faithfully transformed to and
>     from Unicode. These are very rare -- possibly some 2202-x standards
>     -- and we've decided not to support these.

Well, I guess there's a third case: a lazy user (like I am one) has not 
mounted the file system with the correct encoding, so that even ls shows 
a question mark for some files.

As these files had german names, I guess there were some Umlauts, 
encoded in Latin-1. But I mounted the file system with UTF-8 encoding 
and boom!

I know that this is absolutely not monotone's fault. So monotone itself 
should not blame itself, but act a little more self-confident by saying: 
either you are using an unsupported encoding which is very rare or you 
have not properly mounted you file system.

Please note: I'm not sure where all these encoding options are sitting 
nor why exactly I'm getting that error. And I don't even really care 
(I'm a lazy user, remember?). I just renamed the files to 7bit ASCII 
chars only... ;-)

The monotone error message didn't help me much, that's probably why I'm 
complaining at all. As soon as I'm done with my 
cvsimport-branch-reconstruction stuff, I might look into that, for a try.

> If it's not doing so, there's a bug.

I'm all for that very self-critical point of view. But I've seen the 
'this most probably is a bug in monotone' message ways too often in 
cases where monotone wasn't to blame at all. I know it's hard to always 
provide good error messages... but one should always try :-)

Regards

Markus