Re: What's cooking in git.git (Jul 2009, #01; Mon, 06)

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Alex Riesen wrote:
> 
> Maybe we could at least let the user save the encoding of file names
> in the tree objects somehow?

There's no place to really sanely save it in a tree, nor is there really 
even any way to figure the right encoding out. In fact, one of the 
problems with non-utf encodings is that in theory people could literally 
be mixing different encodings in one tree (imagine test-suites etc). 

There's a reason why the only _sane_ model is to use an encoding that is 
universal. 

So we could in theory save an encoding in the commit, but quite frankly, 
it's unlikely that we could use it sanely. Nobody is ever going to write a 
sane merge that will merge across different encodings. So realistically, 
you're going to have a single encoding not per tree, or per commit, but 
for the whole project.

And then when you get fed up with Latin1 or Shift-JIS or whatever crazy 
sh*t people are still using, you use fast-export + script + fast-import, 
and change the encoding for the whole repository that way. Exactly because 
doing it at a smaller granularity is a total pain in the *ss.

			Linus