Re: [PATCH] Update l10n guide

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 2, 2012, 14:56 UTC
Message-ID: <m362enuk53.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <CANYiYbG-Gp0cELF7_CxT1veRod+ookBaucfjCpWZjK1kTC0sAQ@mail.gmail.com>

Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com> writes:

> 2012/3/2 Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net>:

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> > It does not convert, but it records which encoding the text has. If you
> > don't specify anything, UTF-8 is assumed, and if your text is actually not
> > UTF-8, the result is necessarily garbage.
> >
> > Then you haven't set i18n.commitEncoding. Try this:
> >
> >   git config i18n.commitEncoding CP936
> 
> I know there are two config variables. i18n.commitEncoding will insert
> a "encoding XX" line to the commit object, while i18n.logOutputEncoding
> will set the default output encoding.

Note that according to documentation 'git commit' issues a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding. Modern git would also warn if you have NUL ("\0") character in your commit message, e.g. when using UCS-2 / UTF-16 encoding.

> But this implementation seems like a workaround.
> 
> * Tree objects do not have such implementation, so multibyte characters
>   can not be used as filenames.

And there is no place on pathnameEncoding in 'tree' object, unfortunately.

One proposed solution was to convert filenames from filesystem encoding to normal-form composed UTF-8 when creating tree objects, but this would have to be optional.

Anyway at least for source code using characters outside US-ASCII is
really discouraged anyway.  Note also that sample 'pre-commit' hook
prevents adding files with non-ascii filenames.

> * Commit object without "encoding" instruction will be used as it is. So
>   people under the same non-utf8 locale may not notice that they
>   have not set the proper i18n.commitEncoding, until one day they
>   need accross platform development.

But see above.

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> * As raw commit log alway used as fallback, sometimes it is hard to find
>   commit objects with wrong encoding instructions.
> 
> I think save commit object, tree object, packed-refs in UTF-8 is
> a better implementation.

Backward compatibiltiyt and performance.

-- 
Jakub Narebski