Re: [PATCH v1] convert: add support for 'encoding' attribute

Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com> writes:

I am afraid that "treat as" is not sufficiently specific and would invite a misinterpretation, e.g. "You record the bytes I throw at you as-is in the object store, but treat them appropriately as contents that are encoded in cp1252 when presenting".

what is missing is at what stage in the overall user experience does that "treating" happens. That causes such a misinterpretation.

So from that point of view, "checkout-" or" working-tree-" would be a better phrase to accompany "encoding" to clarify what this attr is for than "treat-as".

Having said all that, this "feature" would need a moderate amount of clear description in the documentation, and between the perfect and a suboptimal name, the amount of explanation required would not be all that different, I suspect. We need to say that those who wish to use this attribute are buying into recording their contents in UTF-8 and when the contents are externalized to the working tree, they are converted to the encoding the value of this attribute specifies and vice versa.