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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 23, 2018, 16:35 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqbmgfvf2y.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <19EDC192-0D83-4762-AC6A-81F7D693475A@gmail.com>

Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com> writes:

> I still think it would be nice to see diffs for arbitrary encodings.
> Would it be an option to read the `encoding` attribute and use it in
> `git diff`?

Reusing that gitk-only thing and suddenly start doing so would break gitk users, no? The tool expects the diff to come out encoded in the encoding that is specified by that attribute (which is learned from get_path_encoding helper) and does its thing.

I guess that gitk uses diff-tree plumbing and you won't be applying this change to the plumbing, perhaps? If so, it might not be too bad, but those who decided to postprocess "git diff" output (instead of "git diff-tree" output) mimicking how gitk does it by thinking that is the safe and sane thing to do will be broken by such a change. You could do "use the encoding only when a command line option says so", but then people will add a configuration variable to turn it always on and these existing scripts will be broken.

I do not personally have much sympathy for the last case (i.e. those who scripted around 'git diff' instead of 'git diff-tree' to get broken), so making the new feature only work with the Porcelain "git diff" might be an option. I'll need a bit more time to formulate the rest of my thought ;-)