Re: [PATCH v3 2/4] doc: provide guidance on user.name format

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Nov 3, 2019, 19:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20191103192352.GB32531@camp.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <86pni9hzl6.fsf@gmail.com>

On 2019-11-03 at 13:13:57, Jakub Narebski wrote:

> This reminds me of "Personal names around the world" by W3C
> https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

I hadn't read that document before, but it's definitely the approach I was going for. People all over the world use Git, and we should make it as usable for all of those people as we can.

> Minor nit: should this be one paragraph or two - the linebreak after "of
> a personal name." looks a bit strange?
> 
> No need for a change: just idly wondering.

Good question. I had explained this in my original patch but had to reformat the patch and forgot to include this.

The existing text uses a line break after each sentence, and in AsciiDoc that doesn't introduce a new paragraph; only a blank line does that. I opted to keep this consistent with the rest of the description of this item.

> Just ensuring that I understand it correctly: by "constraints" you mean
> stripping of "<", ">" and "\n" (and by implication "\0")?

Yes, that's correct.

> Should we say anything about encoding?

I don't think it's necessary; since we told people that arbitrary Unicode is permitted, hopefully they will determine that they should use UTF-8, or, for Windows environment variables, UTF-16. Unfortunately, there's not a good way to get UTF-8 environment variables in Windows, so "Unicode" is the best we can do there.

I'm happy to gloss over the fact that they can use something else because (a) while they can, they should not and (b) if they do, they'll know that they're obviously restricted to that subset of Unicode.

-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204