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

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 7:15 PM, Johannes Schindelin
[off-list ref] wrote:

Hi,

[re Cc:ing the list]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Constantine Plotnikov wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Johannes Schindelin
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Constantine Plotnikov wrote:

quoted

If UTF-16[BE|LE] or UCS-4[BE|LE] encodings are used with git log, the
git completes successfully but commit messages and author information
are not shown. I suggest that git should fail with fatal error if such
zero producing encoding is used.

If the incorrect encoding name is used, the git log does not perform any
re-encoding, but just display commits in their native encoding. I
suggest that git should fail with fatal error in this case as well.

Have you set the correct encoding with i18n.commitEncoding?  If not, you
should not be surprised: Git's default encoding is UTF-8, and that fact is
well documented, AFAICT.

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.

A separate problem is that it allows creating commits with invalid
encoding names, which may be unnoticed for a long time in an
environment with uniform commitencoding settings.

Alexander