From: Junio C Hamano Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 10:31:22 GMT Subject: Re: Rss produced by git is not valid xml? Message-ID: <7v7jb57wud.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> In-Reply-To: Linus Torvalds writes: > Although right now "-u" doesn't actually _force_ a conversion: if you have > an email with 8-bit characters and no character set mentioned, it will > silently just do nothing, and the end result won't be valid UTF-8 after > all. ... unless it was already utf8, that is. I have received a couple of patches with charset=utf-8; I think cte of them were qp, which was a bit unpleasant. > If we want utf-8, we should probably force it, and default to the latin1 > translation (with some way to specify alternatives). Well, some people on the list seem to think UTF-8 is the one and only right encoding, so for them if the message does not identify what it is in, assuming UTF-8 and not doing any conversion is probably the right thing ;-). This suggests a few flags (config items) to mailinfo: (1) if we pass thru the input intact or not (1 bit); (2) what charset to assume if the mail does not identify itself (default to latin1; specify "barf" to mean abort processing if a message with 8-bit character does not identify itself); (3) what we do when the mail does not transliterate correctly (1 bit -- fail, or remove offending bytes and pretend things are peachy -- defaulting on the stricter side);