Re: [PATCH] Re: git-mailinfo '-u' argument should be default.

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jan 10, 2007, 00:55 UTC
Message-ID: <7vejq3hf8m.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <1168386544.14763.407.camel@shinybook.infradead.org>

David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> writes:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 10:46 -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> I do not think you would want to make '-n' in the third point
>> sound so negative 
>
> No, I really _do_ want that.
>
>> and make people on projects that chose to use
>> legacy encoding for whatever reasons feel _dirty_. 
>
> ... but not that, because it wasn't aimed at them.
>
>>  If the natural language in project's log is limited and a legacy
>> encoding is sufficient, and if all the participants agree on a
>> legacy encoding to use...
> (...for git's own purely internal storage format).
>
> That's not the use case for the -n option. Their case is what the
> i18n.commitencoding configuration option exists for.

I think you missed a subtle difference.

For a project that is latin-1 only (or ISO-2022 only, for that matter -- 'only' is the real keyword here), users did not have to do anything, and happily kept using git, and that includes that they did not have to set i18n.commitencoding to anything.

Defaulting to -u now means disrupt their established workflows are disrupted by people coming from UTF-8 only world. They now are forced to set i18n.commitencoding to latin-1 and/or use -n.

When we inconvenience others by making changes to make our own life easier, it is not a good idea to insult them at the same time; rather, we should be asking forgiveness from them.