Re: [PATCH (GIT-GUI,GITK) 1/8] git-gui: Cleanup handling of the default encoding.

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 01:07:32AM +0400, Alexander Gavrilov wrote:

- Make diffs and blame default to the system (locale)
  encoding instead of hard-coding UTF-8.
- Add a gui.encoding option to allow overriding it.
- gitattributes still have the final word.

The subject line of this patch is a bit misleading. I would not expect
from "clean up" to change the existing behavior and existing default.

The rationale for this is Windows support:

1) Windows people are accustomed to using legacy encodings
   for text files. For many of them defaulting to utf-8
   will be counter-intuitive.
2) Windows doesn't support utf-8 locales, and switching
   the system encoding is a real pain. Thus the option.

I don't care much what is the default for Windows, but I wonder whether
this rationale is good enough to change the default for other platforms.
If you have systems configured with utf-8 and others (usually old ones)
with legacy encoding, you will store files in utf-8 in your repo, thus
having utf-8 as the default makes sense for non-Windows platforms.

BTW, when you said the system encoding above, what exactly encoding do
you mean? AFAIK, Windows has two legacy encodings OEM-CP and ANSI-CP.
If I write a console program and compile it using MS-VC then it should
use OEM-CP.  However, if you write a GUI program or a console program
that is compiled using gcc from Cygwin, you have to use ANSI-CP. For
instance, if you use the Russian locale on Windows, ASNI-CP is 1251 and
OEM-CP is 866. So, my question is what exactly encoding do you call as
"system" above?

Dmitry