From: Jeff King Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:52:21 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/22] Refactor to accept NUL in commit messages Message-ID: <20111027185220.GA26621@sigill.intra.peff.net> In-Reply-To: <7v7h3qz2yo.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:47:27AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Jeff King writes: > > > I'm tempted to detect the UTF-{16,32}{LE,BE} by their BOM, reencode them > > to utf8, and then display them in utf8. Is that too gross for us to > > consider? > > I tend to think so; it is entirely a different matter if the user > instructed us to clean/smudge UTF-16 payload into/outof UTF-8. Minor nit, but this is just for diff, so it is not about clean/smudge but rather about doing something like textconv. The other option I mentioned would be something like detecting the BOM and pretending as if the attribute "diff=utf-16" was set (which would do nothing by default). Then people could set themselves up to handle utf-16 if they wanted, but wouldn't have to go around marking each file with .gitattributes. But maybe that is too gross, too, and they should just use .gitattributes. -Peff