Re: Rss produced by git is not valid xml?

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote:

I should have dug it up. Apparently it's AUC-JP, not SJIS. 

Anyway. I literally have _no_ idea what the difference between those encodings are. I'm totally clueless when it comes to how the encodings actually work etc. I wouldn't know a Japanese character if it painted itself purple and did a risqué dance number.

But I do know just how slowly these conversions happen, and what a huge deal it is for people who have documents and tools and databases that are encoded in some particular encoding.

You do have to realize that while you may think that it's stupid that people use a non-utf8 encoding, those very people don't actually see a huge advantage from switching away from what has worked for them for decades, and they _do_ see huge transition pains and costs.

So let's say that you have a project where the coding style includes S-JIS or EUC-JP (of which there are multiple variations, I believe, just to make things even more fun). You could argue that if such a project moves into git, it should be converted to UTF-8 at that point. That's all fine and dandy, but usually you don't do flag-days. You have people who start tracking it in git, and maybe even developing it in git, but they still have to work with the outside people.

Want to do on-the-fly conversion on CVS import (or worse yet - something like clearcase)? With magic rules or fragile heuristics for binary files? That's crazy, and that's not how these things work. No, the way these things work is that they continue to be maintained in EUC-JP or whatever, and a tool that requires conversion is a tool that just doesn't get used.

			Linus