From: David A. Wheeler Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 18:13:59 GMT Subject: Re: Re-done kernel archive - real one? Message-ID: <4262A767.4040300@dwheeler.com> In-Reply-To: On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Russell King wrote: >>BTW, there appears to be "errors" in the history committed thus far. >>I'm not sure where this came from though. Some of them could be >>UTF8 vs ASCII issues, ....> ... >>One thing which definitely needs to be considered is - what character >>encoding are the comments to be stored as? Linus Torvalds replied: > To git, it's just a byte stream, and you can have binary comments if you > want to. I personally would prefer to move towards UTF eventually, but I > really don't think it matters a whole lot as long as 99.9% of everything > we'd see there is still 7-bit ascii. I would _heartily_ recommend moving towards UTF-8 as the internal charset for all comments. Alternatives are possible (e.g., recording the charset in the header), but they're incredibly messy. Even if you don't normally work in UTF-8, it's pretty easy to set most editors up to read & write UTF-8. Having the data stored as a constant charset eliminates a raft of error-prone code. --- David A. Wheeler