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

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jan 9, 2007, 18:46 UTC
Message-ID: <7vzm8skphz.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <1168351405.14763.347.camel@shinybook.infradead.org>

David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 17:46 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
>>  ...
> This patch:
>  1. Fixes the default not to throw away the MIME information.
>  2. Adds a '-n' option with the old behaviour, although I can't
>     actually imagine why someone might find that desirable.
>  3. Aborts if the conversion fails, allowing the user to fix it 
>     rather than silently corrupting the input. There's always the
>     new '-n' option if the user _really_ wants it corrupted. :)

Thanks.

Documentation/SubmittingPatches, and Sign-off?

I do not think you would want to make '-n' in the third point sound so negative and make people on projects that chose to use legacy encoding for whatever reasons feel _dirty_. 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 because tools other than git they need to use are more convenient with the legacy encoding rather than UTF-8, there is no need to give a lecture to them saying they should switch to UTF-8 and/or what they have been doing is sub-par -- it isn't.

If the command allows straight-through (and I think it should) but now defaults to UTF-8, you also need to update the existing Porcelain-level tools (i.e. callers of mailinfo) so that they pass -n when the end-user says "I want straight-through"; asking for UTF-8 can be done by either not passing anything or explicitly passing -u, but the point is that the callers need to be changed anyway. And at that point, the default of mailinfo does not matter that much -- although it is good for consistency to make it also default to UTF-8.

I've updated git-am yesterday to default to --utf8 (which is overridable with --no-utf8) but did not touch mailinfo during that process; it further needs to be told about the -n option. I haven't touched git-applymbox yet but it should also be taught about the new default and the override.