On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 16:01 +0100, Rudolf E. Reiber wrote: > I tried Rsync 3.0.0pre8 on my mac running os X 10.5. > > I was very pleased about the --iconv feature, as i have to sync some > LINUX-machines and I had really trouble with some filenames. > But I found one strange thing in connection with the mac. > > First of all, the translation between the LINUX ISO-8859-15 and the > mac ut-8 works (nearly) perfect. > > As I live in Germany, we have often filenames containing special > characters (Umlaute like äöuÄÖÜ). > And all the filenames look perfect on my mac. > > But whenever I run rsync again, all the files containing one of this > special character in the name are deleted and copied again. > And these are quite a lot. > > I found the reason for this behavoiur. > Let me explain it with the example of the letter ä (ü) in HTML. > On the LINUX machines running utf-8 the ä is coded as $C3A4 which is > in utf-8 equal to the character E4. The ä occupies in that way 2 bytes. > > I was very astonished, when I copied a mac-filename, pasted into a > texteditor and looked at the file: > > In the mac-filename the letter ä is coded as: $61CC88, which in utf-8 > means the letter "a" followed by a $0308. (Combining diacritical marks) > So the Mac combines the letter a with the two points above it instead > using the E4 letter > Now the things are clear: The filenames are different, in spite of > looking equally.
Yup. The Mac HFS+ filesystem automatically decomposes Unicode characters in the stored versions of filenames, which confuses a number of programs, including rsync and git. A flamewar about whether to blame the problem on HFS+ or the application has been running on the git list for a week now. > A question to the developers: do you see any solution to this problem? > Perhaps a --icont=utf8mac, iso885915 ? Precisely. We need an iconv encoding name for "the form of UTF-8 that the Mac likes", and none of the existing encodings in the iconv on my computer fit the bill. Another option is store the umlaut-named files on a filesystem other than HFS+ on the Mac. Matt -- To unsubscribe or change options: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html