Re: [PATCH v1] convert: add support for 'encoding' attribute

[Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com>]

> On 12 Dec 2017, at 20:31, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Our favorite is "treat-encoding-as". Do you consider this better
>> or worse than "checkout-encoding"?
> 
> I am afraid that "treat as" is not sufficiently specific and would
> invite a misinterpretation, e.g. "You record the bytes I throw at
> you as-is in the object store, but treat them appropriately as
> contents that are encoded in cp1252 when presenting".
> 
> what is missing is at what stage in the overall user experience does
> that "treating" happens.  That causes such a misinterpretation.
> 
> So from that point of view, "checkout-" or" working-tree-" would be
> a better phrase to accompany "encoding" to clarify what this attr is
> for than "treat-as".

Alright. I'll go with "checkout-encoding" then.


> Having said all that, this "feature" would need a moderate amount of
> clear description in the documentation, and between the perfect and
> a suboptimal name, the amount of explanation required would not be
> all that different, I suspect.  We need to say that those who wish
> to use this attribute are buying into recording their contents in
> UTF-8 and when the contents are externalized to the working tree,
> they are converted to the encoding the value of this attribute
> specifies and vice versa.

Absolutely! The docs will come in v2. I just wanted to send out a v1
to make people aware of what I am working on.

I think storing the encoding in gitattributes might not be the perfect
solution but probably a pragmatic one (because it works and the changes
to Git are rather small). In a perfect world I think I would store
the encoding of a file in the tree object. I didn't pursue that solution
as this would change the Git data model which would open a can of worms
for a problem that not that many people have (almost everyone is on
UTF-8 anyways).

- Lars