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

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 12:14:34PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > Minor nit, but this is just for diff, so it is not about clean/smudge
> > but rather about doing something like textconv.
> 
> I can understand if some tools in the Windows land prefer to work with
> these encodings, so clean/smudge to have the checkout in these encodings
> would be a reasonable thing not just diff but things like grep. On the
> other hand, I do doubt the sanity of these people if they want to have
> in-repository representation also in these encodings.

I'm pretty much of the same mind. We do have people with utf-16 in their
repositories on github. I have no idea why they do such a thing, or what
kinds of tricks they do to make it usable (because without it, they just
get "binary files differ").

My interest is to make things like bare-repository diff (and everything
built on it; i.e., things like github, gitweb, or whatever) do the sane
thing for these people, even if I think what they're doing is wrong. And
as always, I try to structure the git portions of that as much as
possible to be general and help everybody, so they can be pushed
upstream (also, then I don't have to worry about managing local changes
:) ).

But it sounds like this is probably just too ugly and should end up as a
github-specific thing.

-Peff