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by alangpierce 2347 days ago
Got it. So I understand, maybe someone saved a filename as the latin-1 encoding of some non-ASCII text, and Mercurial would need to support such files (but also would have no contextual information that it's latin-1)?

I'm tempted to say "nobody should have filenames like that", but I guess a project like Mercurial needs to be as compatible as possible. Are there modern use cases for filenames like that, or is it fair to say it's all legacy data?
2 comments
xorcist 2347 days ago
It's going to be the case every time you mount a Windows file system, for example.

A big part of the problem is that a project like Mercurial doesn't have control over what files people use it on. They have to design for the pessimal scenario, because when the tool breaks, users complain.

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CJefferson 2347 days ago
If you want to write a version control system, banning a big chunk of perfectly legal filenames on both linux and windows seems like a bad choice. Users do have such filenames, and saying you can't store their files "because they aren't UTF-8" will annoy them.

I've seen such filenames occur from people using the name as a binary encoding in some way. As long as you miss (from wikipedia) NUL, \, /, :, *, ", <, >, | you will end up with a filename which all OSes support, and some systems do that.

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