Re: [PATCH] gitk: UTF-8 support

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org> writes:

> Add gitencoding variable and set it to "utf-8".  Use it for converting
> git-rev-list output.

Sounds good, but is it necessary?  Unless I am grossly mistaken,
I am opposed to this patch.

When I run gitk with LANG and/or LC_CTYPE set to ja_JP.utf8 (I
suspect *whatever*.utf8 would work the same way) on git.git
repository, I see Lukas's name (originally in iso8859-1 but my
commit objects have it in utf8) and Yoshifuji-san's name
(iso2022 converted to utf8) just fine.

And when I run gitk with LANG and/or LC_CTYPE set to ja_JP.ujis
(that is another name for EUC-JP) on a toy repository I have
commit log messages in EUC-JP (I am not recommending that, just
pointing out a possibility), I can see them just fine.  In that
test repository, setting locale to *.utf8 would not work.

So I suspect your change breaks projects that use local
encodings, without fixing or adding anything new.