From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:30:55 GMT
Subject: Re: [RFC] Print diffs of UTF-16 to console / patches to email as UTF-8...?
Message-ID: <20101022173055.GA11923@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <1287768426.31218.75.camel@drew-northup.unet.maine.edu>

Drew Northup wrote:

> Please forgive me for being offended that UTF-16 text is not "generic"
> enough.

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