Re: [PATCH] t8005: Nobody writes Russian in shift_jis

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 21, 2009, 10:07 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfxdtsxvq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <dfYgk9RFOucTCHxtLQsMXejAeKlGJg-R15sTW_RFemcrjsjqoYD0eg@cipher.nrlssc.navy.mil>

Brandon Casey <casey@nrlssc.navy.mil> writes:

> No change on my systems.  I can convert eucJP and SJIS from/to UTF-8, but
> I cannot convert between eucJP and SJIS.

I wonder what's different, but I suspect having lang-support-japanese package on the box perhaps is helping me.

> So tests 2 and 3 still fail for
> me.  Nothing was broken though.  The fourth test still passes which converts
> each of the encodings to UTF-8.  So this patch is fine with me.

Yikes, so it does not really help by itself. Taken together with Alexander's comment that he did manage to send Russian in Shift_JIS (I somehow do not think Alexander used Solaris for that, though; neither have I any clue if the receiving end grokked that), perhaps the patch is useless.

Even though I do not think if any Russian writes in KOI8-R and converts to Shift_JIS on purpose, converting eucJP directly to SJIS is something Japanese people who are on UNIX do quite often, or at least used to before everybody moved to UTF-8.

Perhaps we should instead optionally help platform's iconv(3), when it cannot convert A to B directly, by pivoting the conversion on UTF-8 (i.e. A -> UTF-8 -> B)? That would probably help the real world use cases while fixing the issue with this test script.