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> On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 02:13:59PM -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> > On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Russell King wrote:
> > >>BTW, there appears to be "errors" in the history committed thus far.
> > >>I'm not sure where this came from though. Some of them could be
> > >>UTF8 vs ASCII issues, ....>
> > ...
> > >>One thing which definitely needs to be considered is - what character
> > >>encoding are the comments to be stored as?
> >
> > Linus Torvalds replied:
> > > To git, it's just a byte stream, and you can have binary comments if you
> > > want to. I personally would prefer to move towards UTF eventually, but I
> > > really don't think it matters a whole lot as long as 99.9% of everything
> > > we'd see there is still 7-bit ascii.
> >
> > I would _heartily_ recommend moving towards UTF-8 as the
> > internal charset for all comments. Alternatives are possible
> > (e.g., recording the charset in the header), but they're
> > incredibly messy. Even if you don't normally work in UTF-8,
> > it's pretty easy to set most editors up to read & write UTF-8.
> > Having the data stored as a constant charset eliminates
> > a raft of error-prone code.
>
> Except, I believe, MicroEMACS, which both Linus and myself use. As
> far as I know, there aren't any patches to make it UTF-8 compliant.
>
> The alternative is, I suppose, iconv. However, iconv in _my_ glibc
> seems buggy (segfaults) and my efforts for building glibc 2.3.2 for
> ARM have failed. Effectively that means iconv is inaccessible to
> me.
>