Re: [PATCH v3 5/5] fast-export: do automatic reencoding of commit messages only if requested

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: May 13, 2019, 10:23 UTC
Message-ID: <nycvar.QRO.7.76.6.1905131219490.44@tvgsbejvaqbjf.bet>
In-Reply-To: <CABPp-BEzaSW_eY1yTpLr8tXHei0WV54PFGXmjCLAJNN03Zi3eQ@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Elijah,

On Sat, 11 May 2019, Elijah Newren wrote:

> [...] the craziness is based on how Windows behaves; it seems insane to
> me that Windows decides to munge user data (in the form of the command
> line provided), so much so that it makes me wonder if I really
> understood Hannes' and Dscho's explanations of what it is doing.

It is not the user data that is munged by *Windows*, but by *Git for Windows*. The user data on Windows is encoded in UTF-16 (or some slight variant thereof). Git *cannot* handle UTF-16. Git's test suite *cannot* handle UTF-16. So we convert. That's all there is to it.

Ciao, Dscho

P.S.: Of course it is not *all* there is to it. There is also a current code page which depends on the current user's current locale. We can definitely not rely on that, as Git has no idea about this and would quite positively produce incorrect output because of it. So we really just use the `*W()` functions of the Win32 API (i.e. the ones accepting wide Unicode characters and strings, i.e. UTF-16). I don't think we can do better than that.