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Mac OS X umlaut problem

PostPosted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 1:39 pm
by schwede
Hi,

after struggling for about three days I'm at a loss as to how to solve this problem:
* we are running an svn server for development purposes, no problem.
* we set up another project on the machine for administrative purposes, no problem either.
* we entered a lot of files into it from a windows box - all rigth so far.
* here comes the problem: when checking out repository content to a mac os x client, all files/directories with german "Umlaute" in it (ä=ä, ö=ö etc) show up twice:
* once as a missing file that needs checkout/update
* once as a new file that needs adding
Research on the topic revealed that there is a problem with the way OS X handles unicode characters (or, more abstract, with differences in the way that WIN/Unix/OS X handles them).
Has anyone encountered the problem? I could reproduce it in two commandline svn clients, in svnX and right now in syncro svn.
Is there a known solution (other than buying a windows notebook or renaming all umlaut files)?

Thanks,
Bernd-Christoph

PostPosted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 4:40 pm
by sorin
Hello,

I cannot reproduce the problem with files containing the ä and ö characters in the file name checked out with Syncro SVN Client from a SVN repository on a Mac OS X computer. Can you post the details of a test account on that SVN server to try to reproduce the problem with the SVN server that you used?


Regards,
Sorin

Re: Mac OS X umlaut problem

PostPosted: Thu Apr 07, 2011 3:03 pm
by sven
Hi, same Problem here on VisualSVN-Server 2.1.6 running on Windows SBS2008 and SyncroSVN-Client 6.2 build 2011040614 running on OSX 10.6.7.

Using german umlauts in filenames you end up with described problem. Other OSX-Clients don't have this problem in my setup (but suck :wink: ).

Sven

Re: Mac OS X umlaut problem

PostPosted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 9:17 am
by Florin
Hi,

Subversion has standardized to store file names encoded as UTF-8 in the repository. But, there are different types of UTF-8 and Subversion has not defined what type to use. Windows and Linux (usually) create files with the so-called composed UTF-8 variant, Mac OS X uses the decomposed UTF-8 variant (the same character will be stored as two characters on the file system). Even if creating a file on Mac OS X using the composed form, it will be stored and reported by the file system in the decomposed form.

Subversion maintains a list of the version controlled files of the current directory in the .svn administrative directory. When using the svn status command (used by Syncro SVN Client to list the files in the Working Copy view), it basically compares this list with the file names reported from the file system. Problems occur if this list of version controlled files is using a different UTF-8 variant than the file system reports its files. Until now, Subversion command-line client has no knowledge about the different UTF-8 variants, so it compares the file names incorrectly.

Most quickest solution (but not the best) is to avoid files with umlauts (or any other type of accents) in their names.

You can read more about this issue on:



Best Regards,
Florin Avram
----------------------
Syncro SVN Client Team