BUG: subversion cannot deal with composed/decomposed unicode difference on OSX

[plk]

There is ongoing debate with subversion developers about how to deal with the composed/decomposed unicode difference that is manifest on OSX (because only OSX uses decomposed unicode). Bascically unicode characters with foreign accents etc. do not work with SVN on OSX - it's a huge problem for developers with non-english file names on OSX. See here for a description of the problem:

​http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/unicode-composition-for-filenames

and here for a patch to fix it temporarily until it's officially fixed.

​http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2464

I've tried the patch and it works. Current macports subversion (1.5.5) is broken on OSX in the way described in the above page. Since this issue is really only manifest on OSX, it probably makes sense to patch it in the macports version ...

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

Assigning to maintainer.

[danielluke (Daniel J. Luke)]

Isn't the patch solution 1 from ​http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/unicode-composition-for-filenames ?

Solution (1) has a very strong CON: it will break all pre-existing
MacOSX-only workshops.  Consider a client which starts sending NFC
encoded paths in an environment where all paths have been NFD encoded
until that time - without proper support in the server.  This would
result in commits with NFC encoded paths to files for which the path
in the repository is NFD encoded: breakage.

I would rather use a patch that has been accepted to svn trunk (or if there is going to be a release shortly to fix this, then wait for that).

If neither option is appearing soon, perhaps including it in a variant may be reasonable (although not really ideal).

[plk]

Replying to dluke@…:

The patch is linked in the forum discussion here:

​http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2464

in a post from Hishori Saito. I think it would have to be a variant for now because of the problems you mentioned from the detailed issue report. I see no sign of it being patched officially for quite some time unfortunately - it's been over three years since it was reported and it's a show-stopper on OSX if you encounter it. The patch is against the version of SVN included with Leopard but I suspect it will work ok. It would be nice to have a variant which fixes this as currently, there is no version of subversion for OSX which doesn't have this problem.

PK

[danielluke (Daniel J. Luke)]

Yes, I had read through the subversion bug.

I've committed a variant in r44499 (which includes a warning noting that it causes incompatibilities).

If a differing solution gets added to trunk, I'll try and update the patch and/or incorporate those changes into the main port (and obsolete this patch).

[(none)]

Milestone Port Bugs deleted