What DVCS support Unicode filenames?

Question

I\'m interested in trying out distributed version control systems. git sounds promising, but I saw a note somewhere for the Windows port of git that says \"don\'t use non-AS

Answer 1

Mercurial

On Linux, I think Mercurial just encodes in whatever is the system's encoding (correct me if I'm wrong). So best to set Linux up for UTF-8 for cross-platform compatibility. This is the default for many modern distributions.

On Windows, Mercurial (due to Python's byte string handling) uses the system code page. This just about guarantees bad cross-platform interoperation for non-ASCII characters.

fixutf8 Extension for Windows (prior to Mercurial 2.0)

There is an externally-created Mercurial extension called fixutf8 for Windows which properly handles all Unicode characters (even those outside the current code page) and encodes the filenames as UTF-8 in the Mercurial repository. It thus enables interoperation with Linux as long as Linux is using the UTF-8 encoding. I tried enabling it on my Windows set-up last week, and had a couple of problems with installation. Since then, one problem has been fixed. Now the only issue is that the binary Mercurial distributions are built with Python 2.4, while fixutf8 requires Mercurial to be built with Python 2.5 or higher to load fixutf8. I expect this will be resolved in the near future.

Mercurial 2.0 and later for Windows

fixutf8 seems to be incompatible with Mercurial 2.0 and later, according to the fixutf8 web page. See WindowsUTF8Plan for details on future solutions. I'm not sure when this is expected to be implemented.