Special characters in filenames (between Windows & Linux) blocks pull

[Damien Buhl]

Hello dear msysGit developers,

I'm using msysGit and Git for a while now in differents mixed teams
(multiple OS), and I'm wondering if you were aware about the following
issue:
-> When someone creates a file with an accent of special caracter
like : "état de l'art.docx" (Yes I know such names are not a really
great choice, although I tried to convince them that it was bad but
french teams I've been working with doesn't want to change their habit
of naming files with accents, spaces and so on, there is always one
men which will do it, even by error (i.e. In fact I'm happy they don't
know the shortcut for "œ" otherwise I would get things like "cœur du
système.dia").

And this is annonying with git, because if some Windows user names a
file with accents, and do a small git add . && git commit && git push,
it will work well for all the windows users which will do a git pull,
otherwise all the linux/mac os x users wont be able to do a pull or
clone, because of the special characters.

So when I try to check out a last commit containing this kind of files
I get the following message:
git checkout 99acad29f4dd5a2f2afa830ff1cf52380a0841d3
error: git checkout-index: unable to create file docs/Livrable 15
Novembre - P�le Jeu Vid�o.pdf (Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide
character)
D "docs/Livrable 15 Novembre - P\364le Jeu Vid\351o.pdf"

Indeed the special chars are tried to be created on linux file systems
with \charCode. What is horrible with that is that the linux user
needs a windows guy to solve the situation: only a pull or clone from
a version with a fixed file name can save him, everything else doesn't
work anymore.

So I wanted to know if this was fixed or not ? And if not if someone
can bring me indications on where to fix that ?

Kindest regards,
--
Damien Buhl
alias daminetreg

[Konstantin Khomoutov]

On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 11:11:00PM -0700, Damien Buhl wrote:

> I'm using msysGit and Git for a while now in differents mixed teams
> (multiple OS), and I'm wondering if you were aware about the following
> issue:
> -> When someone creates a file with an accent of special caracter
> like : "état de l'art.docx" (Yes I know such names are not a really
> great choice, although I tried to convince them that it was bad but
> french teams I've been working with doesn't want to change their habit
> of naming files with accents, spaces and so on, there is always one
> men which will do it, even by error (i.e. In fact I'm happy they don't
> know the shortcut for "œ" otherwise I would get things like "cœur du
> système.dia").

[...]

http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/issues/detail?id=80

See comments 74 and 77 there, in particuar, for a proposed patch by
Karsten Blees which supposedly works. If you have time and experience,
you could try to apply it and see if it helps in your case.