Re: Bug: UTF-16, UCS-4 and non-existing encodings for git log result in incorrect behavior

["Alexander Gavrilov" <angavrilov@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Johannes Schindelin
<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Alexander Gavrilov wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Johannes Schindelin
>> <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>> > On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Constantine Plotnikov wrote:
>> >> Commit encoding is set correctly. The problem is that git log and git
>> >> show do not support the *output* encodings UTF-16 and UCS-4 and
>> >> silently fail in that case instead of reporting the error.
>> >
>> > That looks more like an iconv bug to me.  I assume you are using Windows?
>>
>> Iconv has no way to know that git cannot work with ASCII-incompatible
>> encodings, and UTF-16 is incompatible, because it fills the output with
>> loads of zero bytes. Git both truncates messages on these bytes, and
>> forgets inserting them in strings that it produces itself.
>
> Ah, I thought that the issue was that Git would not handle commits in that
> encoding correctly.  Instead, it appears that Git cannot work with UTF-16
> _displays_.

Actually, I think that using those encodings in commits is asking for
trouble too, because the encoding conversion is, as far as I remember,
applied to the entire contents of the commit object, and Git,
naturally, doesn't insert any null bytes in the commit headers to
please the decoder. The result is a completely trashed object on
output.

Also, I think that they are generally a poor choice of an encoding for
data transmission, because they are ASCII-incompatible,
stdlib-incompatible, unreliable to loss and addition of single bytes,
and have no way to detect encoding mismatch except by metadata or
heuristics: almost any string of shorts is "valid".

Alexander