From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2015 16:42:17 GMT
Subject: Re: Should the --encoding argument to log/show commands make any guarantees about their output?
Message-ID: <xmqqzj3y2snq.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <557E91D2.3000908@googlemail.com>

Jan-Philip Gehrcke <jgehrcke@googlemail.com> writes:

> I was surprised to see that the output of
>
>     git log --encoding=utf-8 "--format=format:%b"
>
> can contain byte sequences that are invalid in UTF-8. Note: I am using
> git 2.1.4 and the %b format specifier represents the commit message
> body.

Yeah, if the original was bad and cannot be sanely expressed in
UTF-8, you have two options.  You can show the contents as raw bytes
recorded in the object with a warning so that the user can use it as
such (e.g. perhaps the original was indeed an iso8859-2 but was
incorrectly marked as UTF-8, or something like that, and a human
that is more intelligent than a tool _could_ guess and attempt to
recover).  Or you can error out and refuse to produce output.

We deliberately made a design choice to take the former option.