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

[Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>]

Am 11.12.2017 um 16:50 schrieb lars.schneider@autodesk.com:
> From: Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com>
> 
> Git and its tools (e.g. git diff) expect all text files in UTF-8
> encoding. Git will happily accept content in all other encodings, too,
> but it might not be able to process the text (e.g. viewing diffs or
> changing line endings).
> 
> Add an attribute to tell Git what encoding the user has defined for a
> given file. If the content is added to the index, then Git converts the
> content to a canonical UTF-8 representation. On checkout Git will
> reverse the conversion.
> 
> Reviewed-by: Patrick Lühne <patrick@luehne.de>
> Signed-off-by: Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com>
> ---
> 
> Hi,
> 
> here is a WIP patch to add text encoding support for files encoded with
> something other than UTF-8 [RFC].
> 
> The 'encoding' attribute is already used to view blobs in gitk. That
> could be a problem as the content is stored in Git with the defined
> encoding. This patch would interpret the content as UTF-8 encoded and

This will be a major drawback for me because my code base stores text 
files that are not UTF-8 encoded. And I do use the existing 'encoding' 
attribute to view the text in git-gui and gitk. Repurposing this 
attribute name is not an option, IMO.

> it would try to reencode it to the defined encoding on checkout > Plus, many repos define the attribute very broad (e.g. "* 
encoding=cp1251").
> These folks would see errors like these with my patch:
>      error: failed to encode 'foo.bar' from utf-8 to cp1251

-- Hannes