Re: [RFC] Print diffs of UTF-16 to console / patches to email as UTF-8...?

> Drew Northup wrote:
> 
> > Please forgive me for being offended that UTF-16 text is not "generic"
> > enough.
> 
> First some words of explanation.
> 
> By "generic" I did not mean ubiquitous, unbranded, popular, or some
> other almost-synonym.  What I actually meant is that it is not obvious
> what to do with UTF-16.  Should it be converted to UTF-8 for output?
> Should it always be normalized when added to the index, so that
> switching between canonically equivalent sequences does not result
> in spurious diffs?  Should the byte-for-byte representation be
> faithfully preserved, even when it is not valid UTF-16?
> 
> When in such a situation, often a good approach is the following:
> take care of mechanism first, then policy.  So the first thing to do
> is to make sure that the code is _capable_ of what people are trying
> to do; then one can try various configurations and see what is most
> convenient; and finally, one can make sure the program behaves in an
> intuitive way by setting a reasonable default.
> 
> So by "generic" I meant those mechanisms that can be used in the
> context of multiple policies.