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

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Dmitry Potapov [off-list ref] wrote:

It is not about how data are stored locale but what is in repository.
Even if you still have some Linux box with legacy encoding on it, you
still want to see what in repository, which is mostly likely to be in
UTF-8. Even if you do not have UTF-8 locale, all decent editors are
capable to read and store files in UTF-8 (even if it is not your locale),
and it is really make sense to store files in UTF-8, which makes sense
because you are going then on a modern Linux, you want to have all data
in the repository to be in a single encoding, and UTF-8 is the best
choice for that.

A new user would expect to see his files properly, and they are likely
to be in the locale encoding. And if you know about utf-8, you can
open the Options dialog, and select it explicitly from a menu. And if
you commit a .gitattributes file with encoding specifications to the
repository, it will be used automatically wherever you check it out.

This patch is certainly a big improvement, as it allows to choose what
encoding you want to see, but I was not sure that changing the default
from UTF-8 to the system locale is really a good idea for anything but
Windows specific projects. Anyway, I have converted all computers that
I use regularly to UTF-8, so I don't really care...

You are here missing the fact, that the actual current default for
git-gui is not utf-8, but 'binary', essentially equivalent to
ISO-8859-1. UTF-8 was suggested by a patch that has been around in the
'pu' branch since January, and which I took as a base for my series.
Gitk on the other hand uses the locale encoding.

Alexander