Re: gitweb forgets to send utf8 header for raw blob views

Jan Engelhardt wrote:

Gitweb should probably not be recoding blobs, so the best I can think of is check for UTF-8 validity and add charset=utf-8 in that case (and in other cases leave the charset undeclared).

The drawback with that is that we cannot send plain blobs without reading them into memory (or reading them twice), since we have to check for UTF-8 validity of the whole blob before sending it. (Gitweb is currently reading the whole blob into memory, but that's unnecessary and could be changed in the future.)

After my next refactoring, there *might* be some chance to easily implement something like "if it's smaller than x KB (e.g. 512), read it into memory, check for valid UTF-8 and optionally add charset=utf-8, otherwise don't read it into memory and send it without charset=utf-8 [or perhaps check for BOM presence at the beginning]." I'll remember if/when it comes up in my refactoring and get back to the mailing list about it.

-- Lea