Re: Path character encodings

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 5, 2012, 22:18 UTC
Message-ID: <7v62eizo7g.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120305220232.GA18247@jupiter.local>

Paul Betts <paul@paulbetts.org> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 01:40:32PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Hmph, I do not see a reason to make a huge molehill in this. The
>> pathnames are of unspecified encoding, and if a project declares
>> that they always use UTF-8, that would be great. 
>
> I would like to propose, that Git codifies-as-required the majority case
> today, that trees should *only* be encoded in UTF-8 going forward.

I am afraid that that would be a hard sell.

As the pathnames are uninterpreted strings, an older project that has been using 8859-1 (or EUC for various locales, or anything that is superset of ASCII) has no good incentive or reason to follow such a unilateral decision made outside their project, only to get their participants inconvenienced. Even giving a "warning" will trigger "Yeah we know our paths are in latin-1 and everybody in our project has happily been using that, thankyouverymuch!" and annoy them.

It is not an argument that their history can be re-coded to UTF-8 without losing information, if they still have to go through the conversion process that their project do not benefit from.

Can we make this per-project opt-*in* somehow?