OS X Terminal Internationalization

I have a problem and I have high hopes that this might solve it. A little background is in order. To manage our internal documents we are using Subversion. Not only for development stuff but also for all other documents. The nice thing is that everything is versioned, backed up, and available from every pc. A small _svn update_ , and all documents are up to date, a small _svn commit_ with a comment and your new version is in. All cool.

On Windows, we don’t have a problem but on OS X there is one. The thing is that Subversion was done for development stuff and the shell is not really done for the average joe. There is a tool for OS X called svnX but that is really nothing more than a wrapper for the shell commands. The OS X shell is not properly internalized. The problem is that the German letters like üäö do not propperly work, and for business documents, this is something you use a lot. E.g. Founding would be called Gründung.

As the internationalization is not perfect, svn checkout will get the documents on your hard disk. After that is done you have one document that is called Gründung.doc for example. But when you do a ls, you will not get Gründung.doc but something like GruSOMETHINGndung.doc. When Subversion then does a status check it will tell you that you do not have Gründung.doc in your directory and a GruSOMETHINGndung.doc that does not have a status in the Subversion directory. As there are lots of documents with äöü you will have e.g. 30 documents that are not subversioned and 30 document that are missing.

Now that is a PAIN! And all tries to internationalize the shell have been unsuccessful. .profile now includes:

_export LCCTYPE=deDE.UTF-8

export LCALL=deDE.UTF-8

export LANG=deDE.UTF-8

export LANG=enUS.UTF-8_

Nothing. I also built a new bash from MacPorts. Nothing either. I would be happy for any suggestions.