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RE: Support for EBCDIC

From
Jason Pyeron <jpyeron@pdinc.us>
Date
Jul 3, 2014, 20:01 UTC
Message-ID
<46A5AE733A22492FBD719EE01B20B0E7@black>
In-Reply-To
<20140703173413.GC20571@sigill.intra.peff.net>
Show 10 quoted lines
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff King
> Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2014 13:34
> 
> 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.

If the core uses specific 8bit values for the internals then there is a hope and prayer.

E.g. "blob" would need to be char _BLOB={0x62,0x6c,0x6f,0x62} because the hash calculation would be wrong if were {0x82,0x93,0x96,0x82} ensuring the compiler does not change that "binary" data value.

Show 9 quoted lines
> 
> 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).

And then all output would require code-page aware translation, but fix the above first.

Show 9 quoted lines
> 
>   - 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).
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Previous: Jeff King
Message 3 of 3 in “Support for EBCDIC”
  1. Scott McKellarJul 3, 2014
  2. Jeff KingJul 3, 2014
  3. Jason PyeronJul 3, 2014

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