Re: Git Attribute: File Text Encoding {WAS: Re: [RFC] Print diffs of UTF-16 to console / patches to email as UTF-8...?}

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 22, 2010, 21:49 UTC
Message-ID: <m3sjzxkifz.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <1287778695.819.17.camel@drew-northup.unet.maine.edu>

Drew Northup <drew.northup@maine.edu> writes:

Show 23 quoted lines

> On Fri, 2010-10-22 at 14:53 -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> > Joshua Juran wrote:
> 
> > >                                                      But a more
> > > complete and robust solution would be to store the encoding
> > > somewhere, possibly in the blob itself, or in the tree storing the
> > > filename.
> > 
> > How about Jakub's idea of keeping it in .gitattributes (or some
> > similarly visible key/value store)?  Two reasons:
> > 
> >  1. When asked to declare encoding, half the time people will be
> >     wrong.  So it seems worthwhile to make the declared encoding
> >     visible enough to fix.
> > 
> >  2. Two ASCII files identical except that one is declared as
> >     latin1 and the other utf8 should be considered identical.
> > 
> > Thanks for some food for thought.
> 
> I think that's a fine place to start. Shall I start a branch for it when
> I get home (where the code I'm working on is located)? It would be good
> practice if nothing else...

Just for clarification: Git supports and uses `encoding` gitattribute, but it is used currently _only_ bu git-gui (by converting from `encoding` gitattribute to `git.encoding` given by config).

The places that are missing:

1. A way to check attribute of a file in given tree.  Currently 
   git-check-attr checks for .gitattributes _only_ from working
   area (in addition to unversioned .git/info/attributes, and perhaps
   in the future core.attributesFile a la core.excludesFile).

2. A consensus where conversion should take place: at which level
   in stack, for what output destination, etc.

3. Support for i18n.blobOutputEncoding, which would convert (unless
   overriden) e.g. in 'git show <blob>', and perhaps also in diff.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git