Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/22] Refactor to accept NUL in commit messages

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:14:34 -0700

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:47:27AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:
>> 
>> > I'm tempted to detect the UTF-{16,32}{LE,BE} by their BOM, reencode them
>> > to utf8, and then display them in utf8. Is that too gross for us to
>> > consider?
>> 
>> I tend to think so; it is entirely a different matter if the user
>> instructed us to clean/smudge UTF-16 payload into/outof UTF-8.
>
> Minor nit, but this is just for diff, so it is not about clean/smudge
> but rather about doing something like textconv.

I can understand if some tools in the Windows land prefer to work with
these encodings, so clean/smudge to have the checkout in these encodings
would be a reasonable thing not just diff but things like grep. On the
other hand, I do doubt the sanity of these people if they want to have
in-repository representation also in these encodings.

So I do not think "it is just for diff" is any improvement.