Re: Bug: UTF-16, UCS-4 and non-existing encodings for git log result in incorrect behavior

From: Alexander Gavrilov <angavrilov@gmail.com>
Date: Nov 12, 2008, 16:17 UTC
Message-ID: <bb6f213e0811120817i20d5c0ajf0c9e289c11387a6@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0811121714280.30769@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> Hi,
>
> [re Cc:ing the list]
>
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Constantine Plotnikov wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Johannes Schindelin
>> <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Constantine Plotnikov wrote:
>> >
>> >> If UTF-16[BE|LE] or UCS-4[BE|LE] encodings are used with git log, the
>> >> git completes successfully but commit messages and author information
>> >> are not shown. I suggest that git should fail with fatal error if such
>> >> zero producing encoding is used.
>> >>
>> >> If the incorrect encoding name is used, the git log does not perform any
>> >> re-encoding, but just display commits in their native encoding. I
>> >> suggest that git should fail with fatal error in this case as well.
>> >
>> > Have you set the correct encoding with i18n.commitEncoding?  If not, you
>> > should not be surprised: Git's default encoding is UTF-8, and that fact is
>> > well documented, AFAICT.
>> >
>> Commit encoding is set correctly. The problem is that git log and git
>> show do not support the *output* encodings UTF-16 and UCS-4 and
>> silently fail in that case instead of reporting the error.
>
> That looks more like an iconv bug to me.  I assume you are using Windows?
>

Iconv has no way to know that git cannot work with ASCII-incompatible encodings, and UTF-16 is incompatible, because it fills the output with loads of zero bytes. Git both truncates messages on these bytes, and forgets inserting them in strings that it produces itself.

A separate problem is that it allows creating commits with invalid encoding names, which may be unnoticed for a long time in an environment with uniform commitencoding settings.

Alexander