From: Horst von Brand <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 13:56:10 GMT
Subject: Re: gitweb: charset problem
Message-ID: <200510241356.j9ODuAHn005060@laptop11.inf.utfsm.cl>
In-Reply-To: <nico-linux-git@schottelius.org>

Nico -telmich- Schottelius <nico-linux-git@schottelius.org> wrote:
> gitweb (my $version = "247";) seems to send utf-8 as meta tag encoding
> (<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>).

> The problem is that the name of the user "HansjOErg" (OE is the german
> umlaut) is in iso8859-1 in /etc/passwd.  This is guessed, but it does not
> look like utf-8, as it's a one byte encoding:

> 00007b0: 3031 323a 3130 303a 4861 6e73 6af6 7267  012:100:Hansj.rg

> What would be the correct way to fix that? Change the username to utf-8?
> (Is this possible without causing problems in other programs?)
> Or tell gitweb that it should convert non-UTF-8 to UTF-8?

I'd be /very/ wary of usernames that aren't plain ASCII, just lovercase
letters and digits, not starting with a digit, at most 8 characters long.
I've seen more than enough hard-to-debug funnies in the most surprising
places otherwise.

> But we also have another problem: Sometimes we have umlauts in the commit
> messages.  Those are also displayed incorrectly. When I switch to
> iso-8859-1 encoding in mozilla, the characters in the username and in the
> commit message are ok.

I believe the Emperor Penguin decreed messages have to be ASCII, or else
UTF-8. Please don't add to the mess by using non-portable encodings!
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513