Re: [Monotone-devel] Is the windows port active?

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 05:58:41AM +0000, Nuno Lucas wrote:
> One is monotone complaining about file names which are not Unicode
> (there was file name corruption because the original source code was
> compressed with a non-Unicode zip application). I believe this to be a
> bug on monotone, because it's not it's job to assume file names are
> Unicode. It should behave like the linux and windows kernel, where
> file names are treated like blob's (with a few restrictions).

Unfortunately, that is wrong, because mtn is a tool for collaboration,
and different people have different locale configurations, and thus
need to use different binary blobs to get "the same" filename.  If you
add a filename using some ISO8859 charset, and then I check it out in
my utf8 locale, I'll get nonsense.  So monotone needs to know how to
convert between its internal (utf8) representation and that of the
user's local filesystem.

What you ran into is a really long-standing bug where mtn's directory
scanner (invoked only for 'ls unknown', recursive add, and a few other
things) doesn't properly do character conversion.  This is true on
both win32 and posix, just you probably are using a utf8 locale on
linux, in which case the missing conversion is a no-op anyway, so you
haven't had a problem.  This would certainly be a good bug to fix, it
*keeps* biting people.

> And just now (the reason I decided to write this), because monotone
> opened "Notepad" to let me enter the commit message and bugging out
> because it couldn't convert my message to UTF-8 (the message was
> written in plain Portuguese, nothing extraordinary). Oh, and it failed
> to preserve the "bad" message in "_MTN/log"

Dunno why that would be -- presumably either some sort of bug in
guessing what charset you used, or (less likely) a bug in monotone's
charset conversion routines on win32.  Monotone seems to think that
you wrote your commit message in "Portuguese_Portugal.1252", and
that's what it tried to convert out of -- what charset does notepad
spit out for you?

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways.