Re: [PATCH v7 0/7] convert: add support for different encodings

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

Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com> writes:

> I still think it would be nice to see diffs for arbitrary encodings.
> Would it be an option to read the `encoding` attribute and use it in
> `git diff`?

Reusing that gitk-only thing and suddenly start doing so would break
gitk users, no?  The tool expects the diff to come out encoded in
the encoding that is specified by that attribute (which is learned
from get_path_encoding helper) and does its thing.

I guess that gitk uses diff-tree plumbing and you won't be applying
this change to the plumbing, perhaps?  If so, it might not be too
bad, but those who decided to postprocess "git diff" output (instead
of "git diff-tree" output) mimicking how gitk does it by thinking
that is the safe and sane thing to do will be broken by such a
change.  You could do "use the encoding only when a command line
option says so", but then people will add a configuration variable
to turn it always on and these existing scripts will be broken.

I do not personally have much sympathy for the last case (i.e. those
who scripted around 'git diff' instead of 'git diff-tree' to get
broken), so making the new feature only work with the Porcelain "git
diff" might be an option.  I'll need a bit more time to formulate
the rest of my thought ;-)