Re: [PATCH (GIT-GUI,GITK) 1/8] git-gui: Cleanup handling of the default encoding.

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 18, 2008, 15:02 UTC
Message-ID: <20080918150238.GC21650@dpotapov.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <1221685659-476-2-git-send-email-angavrilov@gmail.com>

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 01:07:32AM +0400, Alexander Gavrilov wrote:

> - Make diffs and blame default to the system (locale)
>   encoding instead of hard-coding UTF-8.
> - Add a gui.encoding option to allow overriding it.
> - gitattributes still have the final word.

The subject line of this patch is a bit misleading. I would not expect from "clean up" to change the existing behavior and existing default.

Show 7 quoted lines

> The rationale for this is Windows support:
> 
> 1) Windows people are accustomed to using legacy encodings
>    for text files. For many of them defaulting to utf-8
>    will be counter-intuitive.
> 2) Windows doesn't support utf-8 locales, and switching
>    the system encoding is a real pain. Thus the option.

I don't care much what is the default for Windows, but I wonder whether this rationale is good enough to change the default for other platforms. If you have systems configured with utf-8 and others (usually old ones) with legacy encoding, you will store files in utf-8 in your repo, thus having utf-8 as the default makes sense for non-Windows platforms.

BTW, when you said the system encoding above, what exactly encoding do you mean? AFAIK, Windows has two legacy encodings OEM-CP and ANSI-CP. If I write a console program and compile it using MS-VC then it should use OEM-CP. However, if you write a GUI program or a console program that is compiled using gcc from Cygwin, you have to use ANSI-CP. For instance, if you use the Russian locale on Windows, ASNI-CP is 1251 and OEM-CP is 866. So, my question is what exactly encoding do you call as "system" above?

Dmitry