Problem with SVN filename encoding on Mac OS X

I got an answer from the Subversion mailinglist from B Smith-Mannschott:

This is a known issue.

http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2464

One poster on the comment thread to that issue suggested as follows:

Additional comments from Julian Mehnle Thu Aug 6 07:40:30 -0700 2009:

There is a work-around: install the "unicode_path" variant of the subversion MacPorts package:

$ sudo port install subversion +unicode_path

I haven't tried this myself.

// ben

It seems to work mostly for me but I am not sure what else is broken now.

I did some investigation into the Subversion source and it seems that UTF8 filename support is broken very badly. They kind of ignore the fact that a filename can have different representations in UTF8. They handle all such different representations as different filenames. MacOSX might change the representation internally and this is what Subversion confuses a lot -- and cannot handle.

You can see in their source that their path compare function is basically just a memcpy.

I tried to fix it but I am not really sure if I did or not (and I don't want to waste much more time into it -- it seems to work now but not sure about it).

Read the upstream bug report for more details and a follow-up discussion.