Re: Rss produced by git is not valid xml?

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, Kay Sievers wrote:

I never said they were text, and in fact, I never even said I'm doing an SCM. Quite the reverse. I very much said that I'm doing a filesystem that is flexible.

The fact that the headers are text-like is not so much about text as it is about flexibility and easy tool access. If you look at the git object format, for example, the header is strictly NUL-terminated ASCII, but the object itself is a pure binary data stream. Which obviously just _happens_ to often be text too, since quite often the object contents is something like a C source file, but there's a real power to _not_ thinking that it means that files are text-files.

And I like UTF-8, but the fact is, all my editors and mail tools are still Latin-1. My editor converts the UTF-8 input into latin1 and keeps it in that format on disk (it writes it to the _screen_ as UTF-1 just to make the glyphs come out right, but the file it works with is still latin1).

Could I change? Yup, I could change pretty easily. I wrote the code that did the latin1 conversion, and I've got source for my tools, so I could just decide one day that I'll join the 21st century and switch. I just haven't done so yet.

The fact that _I_ can't be bothered, even though I'm in just about the best possible situation (I've got a keyboard with åäö on it, but they're not in my name, so I don't use them that much) should tell you something. Namely, it should tell you that there's a _lot_ of people who have a much harder time than I do in changing their setups.

I think most of Asia _still_ doesn't use utf-8. And I _guarantee_ you that it's a hell of a lot easier for you to complain about it and say "they should" than it is for them to actually do so and convert all the programs they use.

On this mailing list, the only person that I've seen pipe up about these things in the past _and_ that I suspect actually has to work with this thing in real life (instead of just from a theoretical "this is how things should be done" standpoint) is Junio. And last I heard (if I remember correctly), Junio explicitly said that a lot of the people he works with still use shift-jis.

And I'm not surprised. Look on the web. As far as I know, shift-jis is still much more common than utf-8.

AND IT DOESN'T MATTER ONE WHIT WHEN SOME GEEK SAYS "THEY SHOULDN'T DO THAT, THEN"!

Software should conform to people, not the other way around. 

		Linus