Re: [RFC] Print diffs of UTF-16 to console / patches to email as UTF-8...?

Drew Northup wrote:

First some words of explanation.

By "generic" I did not mean ubiquitous, unbranded, popular, or some other almost-synonym. What I actually meant is that it is not obvious what to do with UTF-16. Should it be converted to UTF-8 for output? Should it always be normalized when added to the index, so that switching between canonically equivalent sequences does not result in spurious diffs? Should the byte-for-byte representation be faithfully preserved, even when it is not valid UTF-16?

When in such a situation, often a good approach is the following: take care of mechanism first, then policy. So the first thing to do is to make sure that the code is _capable_ of what people are trying to do; then one can try various configurations and see what is most convenient; and finally, one can make sure the program behaves in an intuitive way by setting a reasonable default.

So by "generic" I meant those mechanisms that can be used in the context of multiple policies.

Apologies; I never meant to offend; please carry on and I will leave you in peace.

Jonathan