Re: Support for EBCDIC

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 3, 2014, 17:34 UTC
Message-ID: <20140703173413.GC20571@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <1404355152.86116.YahooMailNeo@web184805.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

On Wed, Jul 02, 2014 at 07:39:12PM -0700, Scott McKellar wrote:

> Is Git supposed to be usable in an environment where the execution character set is EBCDIC?

Not really.

In addition to the cases you found (and I would be surprised if there are not more, such as our reimplementation of ctype.h), we assume:

  - we can intermingle ASCII from string literals with user data to form
    diffs, commit objects, network protocols, etc. This is actually a
    problem not just for EBCDIC, but for any encoding which is not an
    ASCII-superset (like UTF-16).

  - many outputs from git should be ASCII in order to interoperate with
    the outside world (object headers, network protocols, etc).

So I'd be surprised if things worked well in an EBCDIC environment (but I have never worked with one, so maybe I do not understand all of the implications).

-Peff