Re: [PATCH (GIT-GUI,GITK) 1/8] git-gui: Cleanup handling of the default encoding.

From: Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net>
Date: Sep 18, 2008, 16:29 UTC
Message-ID: <48D281E6.1070204@viscovery.net>
In-Reply-To: <20080918150238.GC21650@dpotapov.dyndns.org>

Dmitry Potapov schrieb:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 01:07:32AM +0400, Alexander Gavrilov wrote:
>> The rationale for this is Windows support:
>>
>> 1) Windows people are accustomed to using legacy encodings
>>    for text files. For many of them defaulting to utf-8
>>    will be counter-intuitive.
>> 2) Windows doesn't support utf-8 locales, and switching
>>    the system encoding is a real pain. Thus the option.
> 
> I don't care much what is the default for Windows, but I wonder whether
> this rationale is good enough to change the default for other platforms.

"The default" should not be hardcoded in the tool.

By setting the encoding to "system", "the default" is taken from whatever the system's current locale is. If you are on modern Linux, your locale is most likely set to UTF8, and everything is fine; you won't observe a change in behavior.

But if you are on a system whose locale was not set to UTF8, then you very likely did *not* produce UTF8 data, and the display in git-gui was screwed because it assumed UTF8. With this change it uses the system's encoding, and it is an improvement.

> If you have systems configured with utf-8 and others (usually old ones)
> with legacy encoding, you will store files in utf-8 in your repo, thus
> having utf-8 as the default makes sense for non-Windows platforms.

How can you know? For example, I've to work with systems that use "legacy encodings", and I can't use UTF8 in my data. Hence, the default of UTF8 was not exactly useful. With this patch series there's now a mechanism that allows me to state the encoding per file, and all platforms should be able to show the data in the correct way.

-- Hannes