Re: [PATH/RFC] parse-options: report invalid UTF-8 switches

From: Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 11, 2013, 17:15 UTC
Message-ID: <CABPQNSYoS6ik-29HSy14P69n7zJQORDT9Pa2O1BO=hL3wDuTeA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v7gmeok2e.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 6:07 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> However, since git only looks at one byte at the time for
>> short-options, it ends up reporting a partial UTF-8 sequence
>> in such cases, leading to corruption of the output.
>
> Isn't it a workable, easier and more robust alternative to punt and
> use the entire ctx.argv[0] as unrecognized?
>

Perhaps. It doesn't match the output of the usual GNU tools like we currently do, but even the GNU tools only report a single byte.

However, I'm unsure if that totals to an improvement in the common case. We stop telling the user exactly what option was problematic, making it slightly more annoying to read through the options.

So, we'd end up making the common-case worse, by making a special case (that only sometimes affects some users) more robust. Isn't that making the user interface worse?