Re: [PATCH v8 07/15] bugreport: add git-remote-https version

From: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
Date: Feb 25, 2020, 22:08 UTC
Message-ID: <20200225220838.GB212281@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqo8ts7gf5.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>

On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 07:44:30PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com> writes:
> 
> > ... Unfortunately I agree that we wouldn't be equipped to handle
> > reports in other languages.
> 
> I actually was anticipating a far better world ;-) 
> 
> There is no reason to limit the recipient of reports only to *us*.
> Use of Git and population proficient in Git would become wide enough
> that we should be able to expect that users who speak language X can
> be helped by experts who speak the same language X with their
> issues.

Hm. I guess I got the opposite impression from you way back in v1. I do wish it had been communicated a little more clearly; it's frustrating to perceive a reversal after seven months of review. But that's probably on my own reading comprehension :)

Well, I certainly don't mind - but I did have a pretty long conversation with Jonathan Nieder last week about whether it's feasible to make the bugreport extremely stable while also being locale aware. As I understood it, he worried about someone having a misconfigured locale causing the bugreport tool to crash when it tries to set the locale.

But I'm having trouble figuring out how that can happen. It looks like we use libintl.h to do almost all of our string localization, which I have to assume is pretty robust. Or to put it another way, if the user's environment has broken libintl.h, then it seems like they also have bigger problems outside of Git which they would notice already.

(Side note: I went down a rabbit hole of trying to break my locale, and did manage to generate some garbage by setting 'LANG' to a non-UTF-8 character set and setting 'LANGUAGE' to a character set which does require UTF-8, that is, 'LANG=es_MX LANGUAGE=ko git status'.)

How about if I localize the bugreport template, headers, and formatted comments (e.g. "3745 local loose objects"), and include a tip in 'git help bugreport' suggesting that if it doesn't look right, maybe the user wants to run it with 'LANG= LANGUAGE= git bugreport' to ensure it actually gets generated?

I had another thought, actually, that this is maybe semantically similar problem to the malformed config we discussed earlier in the review. Does it make sense to include some kind of --safemode flag to 'git' which asks it to not perform localization and not read configs? I would propose adding it just to git-bugreport, and I could work around some locale weirdness that way, but with a broken config the attempt dies before git-bugreport binary is invoked at all.

 - Emily