From: Jason Pyeron Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 20:01:01 GMT Subject: RE: Support for EBCDIC Message-ID: <46A5AE733A22492FBD719EE01B20B0E7@black> In-Reply-To: <20140703173413.GC20571@sigill.intra.peff.net> > -----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. > > 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. > > - 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). -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- - - - Jason Pyeron PD Inc. http://www.pdinc.us - - Principal Consultant 10 West 24th Street #100 - - +1 (443) 269-1555 x333 Baltimore, Maryland 21218 - - - -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- This message is copyright PD Inc, subject to license 20080407P00.