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

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Torsten Bögershausen <tboegi@web.de> writes:

> May be.
> Originally utf8.c was about encoding and all kind of UTF-8 related stuff.
> Especially it didn't know anything about strbuf.
> I don't know why strbuf.h and other functions had been added here,
>
> I once moved them into strbuf.c without any problems, but never send out
> a patch, because of possible merge conflicts in ongoing patches.
>
> In any case, if it is about strbuf, I would try to put it into strbuf.c

Please don't.

A code that happens to use strbuf as a container and about
manipulating the contents is quite different from a code about
strbuf.  The latter is to enhance and extend how the strbuf as a
container behaves.  An operation about character encoding for a
string that happens to be stored in strbuf is more about the
encoding, and much much less about strbuf.

convert.c is about massaging contents coming from the outside world
into a shape stored in Git and the other way around, and there are
multiple ways the contents are massaged.  EOL convention may be
adjusted, characters may be reencoded, end-user defined conversion
may be applied.  Some of these operations may use helpers specific
for the task from other more library-ish files, like checking if a
string looks like encoded in UTF-8 from utf8.[ch].