Re: [RFC 1/8] UTF helpers

[Jay Soffian <jaysoffian@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> It is rather sad; I suspect that the core of the series is buried in too
> much cruft deep enough to discourage many potential reviewers.  I think
> the entire series look incoherent because attacking two largely unrelated
> things at once.
>
>  (1) Normalizing pathnames internally to UTF-8 and possibly convert it
>     back to native upon use (e.g. creat(), lstat(), unlink()) and output.
>     As Linus analyzed, this shouldn't be done too early in the callchain
>     for performance reasons, but I think your patch would give us a good
>     set of starting points to follow where the result from readdir(),
>     user input and other things that are pathnames come from and go.
>
>     This part of the patch series was inspiring.  You have to worry about
>     gitignore, gitattributes and readlink() vs contents of a blob object
>     that records a symbolic link values, which I think either escaped
>     analysis people have done so far or being ignored as a small detail,
>     but they are important;
>
>  (2) Passing cat-file output through iconv to convert it.
>
>     I think this is unwarranted, even if the object given to cat-file
>     happens to be a commit or a tag object and you want to convert their
>     messages in native encoding.
>
>     I am not sure what should happen to "cat-file tree", "ls-files" and
>     "ls-tree".  The output from these plumbing does show pathnames, but I
>     tend to think it is Porcelain's job to turn them into whatever
>     encoding they want to use.  So are input to "update-index --stdin",
>     but I am still just thinking out loud.

I definitely do not have the time to work on unicode/utf-8/i18n
support for git right now, but as an OS X user, it is something that
interests me. When this topic periodically pops up, I squirrel away
the useful messages into my "someday" folder. So even though it may
seem that reviewing these patches is wasted effort, comments like the
above are helpful. I say this because I expect someday someone will
work on this topic, even if it is not me, and hopefully they can
locate prior discussion in the mailing list archives and as such it
will be of some use.

IOW, your comments are useful and appreciated, even if it doesn't lead
to improved patches right away.

j.