Re: [PATCH v4 0/4] Maintenance IV: Platform-specific background maintenance

From: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Date: Nov 17, 2020, 23:54 UTC
Message-ID: <CAPig+cQCyWKzhm-LUBJ8Xm71KMq=6F+xpeLTCRXNoagtgXAwUg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <pull.776.v4.git.1605647598.gitgitgadget@gmail.com>

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 4:13 PM Derrick Stolee via GitGitGadget <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>  * I noticed far too late that while my example XML files had been edited
>    with UTF-8 encoding, Git is actually writing them as US-ASCII. Somehow
>    xmllint and launchd are not complaining, but schtasks does complain.
>    Unfortunately, I cannot find a way to catch this problem other than to
>    install my tip version on all three platforms and go through the entire
>    git maintenance start process, and double-check that the processes are
>    running on the hour.

I'm having trouble understanding what problem is being described here and whether or not it has been solved by v4.

I might guess that you are saying that `schtasks` insists upon seeing a UTF-8 BOM at the start of the XML file since the XML file declares itself as UTF-8, but that Git is (quite naturally) writing out the file without the UTF-8 BOM.

> -    xml = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n"
> +    xml = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"US-ASCII\"?>\n"

If the above speculation is correct, and if `schtasks` is happy with the plain text file (lacking UTF-8 BOM) declaring itself as US-ASCII, then this seems a reasonable solution. And it's easy to test that this doesn't get broken. After validating the file with `xmllint`, also grep it for US-ASCII, perhaps like this:

    test_xmllint "schedule-$frequency.xml" &&
    grep "encoding=.US-ASCII." "schedule-$frequency.xml"