Subject: Re: [PATCH] ignores: handle non UTF-8 exclude files

From: Phillip Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2026 14:28:08 +0000

On 07/01/2026 01:35, Collin Funk wrote:
> 
> An unfortunate trend that I have seen with Rust programs is that they
> completely disregard the systems locale. E.g. using
> LC_ALL=en_US.ISO-8859-1 and passing an "À" character as an option will
> typically fail since it is encoded as 0xC0 which is not a valid UTF-8
> character.
> 
> I figured it was worth bringing up since Git may wany to think about it
> some before introducing more Rust. I think it can be worked around by
> using OsString [1], but I guess many people choose not to.

Git will certainly want to continue to support non-utf8 encodings. 
That's perfectly possible in rust but in my (rather limited) experience 
it does take a bit more effort than the equivalent code using the 
standard library's String type. I find it particularly annoying that 
"cargo run" refuses to pass non-utf8 arguments to the program being run 
when the program has been carefully written to support them.

Thanks

Phillip