Re: Rss produced by git is not valid xml?

From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Date: Nov 18, 2005, 22:12 UTC
Message-ID: <437E51EB.7050100@zytor.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511181338460.13959@g5.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> 
> Want to do on-the-fly conversion on CVS import (or worse yet - something 
> like clearcase)? With magic rules or fragile heuristics for binary files? 
> That's crazy, and that's not how these things work. No, the way these 
> things work is that they continue to be maintained in EUC-JP or whatever, 
> and a tool that requires conversion is a tool that just doesn't get used.
>

On the fly conversion on CVS import isn't particularly crazy, as long as it's under user control. Although I was primarly thinking about it in the context of commit messages, it could be done on file contents as well, since CVS has the ability to flag files as text or as binary (-kb). We already have a bunch of options relating to how to map CVS onto git, and conversion time is a good time to do it.

Similarly, it may not be a bad idea to add an *option* -- now when we 
have a config file mechanism -- to signal error on invalid UTF-8 import. 
  This would keep a correct UTF-8 repository from getting inadvertently 
messed up.

What *does* need to happen, I'm convinced, is that any tool that handles email needs to be able to take the email and convert its character set encodings (by default to UTF-8). Most MUAs today use all kinds of weird heuristics for which character set to use, and it's frequently not what the user expected.

	-hpa