Re: [PATCH] dir: allow a BOM at the beginning of exclude files

[Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Carlos,

On 2015-04-16 16:05, Carlos Martín Nieto wrote:
> Some text editors like Notepad or LibreOffice write an UTF-8 BOM in
> order to indicate that the file is Unicode text rather than whatever the
> current locale would indicate.
> 
> If someone uses such an editor to edit a gitignore file, we are left
> with those three bytes at the beginning of the file. If we do not skip
> them, we will attempt to match a filename with the BOM as prefix, which
> won't match the files the user is expecting.
> 
> ---
> 
> If you're wondering how I came up with LibreOffice, I was doing a
> workshop recently and one of the participants was not content with the
> choice of vim or nano, so he opened LibreOffice to edit the gitignore
> file with confusing consequences.
> 
> This codepath doesn't go as far as the config code in validating that
> we do not have a partial BOM which would mean there's some invalid
> content, but we don't really have invalid content any other way, as
> we're just dealing with a list of paths in the file.

Yeah, users are entertaining!

I agree that this is a good patch. *Maybe* we would need the same handling in more places, in which case it might make sense to refactor the test into its own function.

In any case, though, the Git project requires a [Developer's Certificate of Origin](https://github.com/git/git/blob/v2.3.5/Documentation/SubmittingPatches#L234-L277); Would you mind adding that?

Thanks,
Dscho