Re: [PATCH 00/22] Refactor to accept NUL in commit messages

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:47:27AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > I'm tempted to detect the UTF-{16,32}{LE,BE} by their BOM, reencode them
> > to utf8, and then display them in utf8. Is that too gross for us to
> > consider?
> 
> I tend to think so; it is entirely a different matter if the user
> instructed us to clean/smudge UTF-16 payload into/outof UTF-8.

Minor nit, but this is just for diff, so it is not about clean/smudge
but rather about doing something like textconv.

The other option I mentioned would be something like detecting the BOM
and pretending as if the attribute "diff=utf-16" was set (which would do
nothing by default). Then people could set themselves up to handle
utf-16 if they wanted, but wouldn't have to go around marking each file
with .gitattributes.

But maybe that is too gross, too, and they should just use
.gitattributes.

-Peff