The fact that Subversion can choose different encodings, depending on the context, for filenames in the working copy can break symbolic links. But the Book seems to be silent on these encoding issues with symbolic links. And I wonder whether there should be a specific flag for each symbolic link saying whether recoding is needed (wanted by the user) or not, as only the user knows how the contents of a symbolic link should be interpreted.
FYI, a quote from http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=251 (about possible future limitations of filename encoding in POSIX): (0001725) dalias (reporter) 2013-08-17 16:13 [...] One further issue I just realized with any sort of escaping is symbolic links: what do you do with link content? If the escaping form is filesystem-type-specific (for instance, only used on network-mounted devices) and not used on the local system that forbids all unwanted characters, you would run into situations where the proper translation of the symbolic link contents depend on where it points to. This is of course unacceptable since symbolic link contents are pure strings and aren't necessarily even being used to access files they point to... -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)