From: Ismail Donmez <ismail@uludag.org.tr>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:22:36 GMT
Subject: Re: Rss produced by git is not valid xml?
Message-ID: <200511182322.37050.ismail@uludag.org.tr>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511181301320.13959@g5.osdl.org>

On Friday 18 November 2005 23:13, you wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, Ismail Donmez wrote:
> > Maybe you could officially require all commit messages to be UTF-8 then
> > the problem would be just solved for future commits at least.
>
> Just think about what that would mean for a second.
>
> What do people put in commit messages? They put things like filenames, to
> indicate that they changed file so-and-so because of issue so-and-so, or
> they needed to include header file so-and-so to fix a problem.
>
> So by virtue of forcing all commit messages to be in UTF-8, you've
> suddenly forced all filesystems to do UTF-8 too.
>
> Take that one step further: you've also forced all the file _contents_
> you talk about to be in UTF-8, since the commit message might quote part
> of the file ("'xyzzy' was misspelled, it should be 'abcde'").
>
> Or alternatively, you've forced the commit message to no longer match the
> reality that it tries to explain.
>
> See the problem?
>
> And that's ignoring the fact that you've unilaterally forced probably 50%
> of asian users to use an environment that they don't normally use.
>
> Remember: it's actually pretty _easy_ for most of the western world to
> move to UTF-8, because 99% of what we do doesn't really care one whit, and
> the remaining 1% isn't usually even a huge problem (ie it's such a small
> percentage that even if you show the wrong character for it, people
> understand what it said).

These days you can just open kwrite, select encoding and voila you don't have 
to change anything on the filesystem you can still use whatever $LANG you 
use. We would just force them to use a working editor imho. Nothing else. And 
thats not much to ask is it? Even joe(1) can edit utf-8 these days that must 
tell something.

Regards,
ismail