Re: [PATCH v7 0/7] convert: add support for different encodings

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 16, 2018, 19:04 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq1shk7o2y.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <DC552BF4-3E87-41E0-BF92-4BA9633D374E@gmail.com>

Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com> writes:

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>> One thing I find more problematic is that the above places *too*
>> much stress on the UTF-8 centric worldview.  It is perfectly valid
>> to store your text contents encoded in ShiftJIS and check them out
>> as-is, with or without this patch.  It is grossly misleading to say
>> that older versions of Git will check them out in UTF-8.  "will
>> checkout these files as-is without encoding conversion" is a better
>> way to say it, probably.
>
> True. But that's not what I wanted to say in the "pitfalls" section.
> If my Git client supports w-t-e and I add the ShiftJIS encoded
> file "foo.bar" to my repository, then Git will store the file as
> UTF-8 _internally_. That means if you clone my repository and your 
> Git client does _not_ support w-t-e, then you will see "foo.bar" as 
> UTF-8 encoded.

What you wrote implies *more* than that, which is what I had trouble with.

If you say "what you have is checked out as-is", then it is still clear that those who use w-t-e to convert non UTF-8 into UTF-8 when checking in will get UTF-8 out when they use an older version of Git. If you say "what you have will be checked out in UTF-8", it makes it sound as if pre w-t-e Git will somehow reject non UTF-8 in-tree contents, or magically convert anything to UTF-8 while checking out, which is *not* what you want to imply.

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>> Also notice that even in the world with w-t-e, such a project won't
>> benefit from w-t-e at all.  After all, they have been happy using
>> ShiftJIS in repository and using the same encoding on the working
>> tree, and because w-t-e assumes that everybody should be using UTF-8
>> internally, such a project cannot take advantage of the new
>> mechanism.
>
> Agreed. However, people using ShiftJIS are not my target audience.

Be aware that you are writing *not* *solely* for your target audience. You write document for everybody, and make sure the description of a feature makes it clear who the feature primarily targets and how using (or not using) the feature affects users.