Re: [PATCH 2/4] Do attempt pretty print in ASCII-incompatible encodings

From: Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 22, 2012, 02:17 UTC
Message-ID: <CACsJy8AJBzZnkKSVYRuwO2T1XEWp+N1HEfiir0oWPpo0vron-A@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20120221182118.GA32668@sigill.intra.peff.net>

2012/2/22 Jeff King <peff@peff.net>:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 09:24:50PM +0700, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:
>
>> We rely on ASCII everywhere. We print "\n" directly without conversion
>> for example. The end result would be a mix of some encoding and ASCII
>> if they are incompatible. Do not do that.
>>
>> In theory we could convert everything to utf-8 as intermediate medium,
>> process process process, then convert final output to the desired
>> encoding. But that's a lot of work (unless we have a pager-like
>> converter) with little real use. Users can just pipe everything to
>> iconv instead.
>
> I'm not sure why we bother checking this. Using non-ASCII-superset
> encodings is broken, yes, but are people actually doing that? I assume
> that the common one is utf-16, and anybody using it will experience
> severe breakage immediately. So are people actually doing this? Are
> there actually encodings that will cause subtle breakage that we want to
> catch?

I did :-) once actually. But that's a good point, using unsuitable encoding leads to garbage output, but no subtle breakage there. It'd be nice to say "your encoding is not supported" than throw garbage, but again probably no one did it but me, and I don't feel like doing it again.

-- 
Duy