Unicode support request.

[Lester Caine]

罗勇刚(Yonggang Luo)  wrote:
>     First correction to your statements ... Windows CHOSE to use UTF16 encoding
>     for wide string file names, rather than
>
>     having to handle the variable byte length of UTF8. Unicode existed long
>     before that choose. As a result of doing that, their 'encoded' character
>     strings are in a lot of *cases blank bytes*
>
> ./ (Sorry, what's this mean, can you give me some string example?) Do you means
> on windows Good.txt and good.TXT is the same filename? but that won't affected
> by UTF8/

*I* put good.txt as a file name in windows but some versions will display it as 
Good.txt and return that name when looking at it from Linux. Add to that the 
niggle of not being able to handle both versions on Windows with windows 
translating Good.txt to good.txt. Widestring file names can give some funny 
differences when displayed on the Linux side, which then gives the problems that 
I'm trying to explain.

>     ADD to this the arbitrary changes to using upper case characters in file
>     names and you get even more combinations of differences. One does not always
>     get the same number of bytes from windows for what should be the same file
>     name if it has been 'converted' from UTF16 and this is the problem that
>     causes trouble.

Mercurial is 'only software', but it has to work with the operating system, and 
when the operating system is not consistent, that is difficult. I still have 
customers with W2k and maintaing things across four versions of windows all of 
which do things a little differently just add to the problem we are all trying 
to solve :( I have to remember when to ensure registry dumps are wide string or 
not, and archiving those dumps was where I started finding these 
incompatibilities. It's not hg that gets them wrong.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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