Re: [egit-dev] Re: jgit problems for file paths with non-ASCII characters

Marc Strapetz [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

We should try to work harder with the git-core folks to get character
set encoding for file names worked out.  We might be able to use a
configuration setting in the repository to tell us what the proper
encoding should be, and if not set, assume UTF-8.

I agree that this should be the ultimate goal, though the default should
better be "system encoding" for compatibility with current git
repositories and instead have newer git versions always set encoding to
UTF-8. Thus, for our jgit clone I've introduced a system property to
configure Constants.PATH_ENCODING set to system encoding. It's used by
PathFilter and this resolves my original problem.

That's probably a good point, using the system encoding on a
repository may produce the file names in a more compatible way
with git-core.  But we probably don't want the encoding to be a
single encoding constant in this JVM, we probably need to support
a per-repository configuration of the encoding for path names so
that we can eventually move to a non-platform specific encoding.

I have tried to switch more usages from Constants.CHARACTER_ENCODING to
Constants.PATH_ENCODING, but ended up in confusion due to my lack of
understanding: primarily because I couldn't tell anymore whether encoded
strings were file names or not.

Heh.  Yea.  There are a number of file name encoding sites.  I think
everything in the treewalk package, as well as the GitIndex, Tree and
DirCache* classes.  Also the Patch class and its FileHeader friend.

Does it make sense to explicitly
distinguish encoding usages in that way? We could try to contribute here
(and hopefully cause less review effort to jgit developers than the
changes itself are worth ;-)

Yes, it does.  Because we eventually need to support encodings
other than the current UTF-8 we assume for file names, especially
if a repository is using the local filesystem encoding and that
isn't UTF-8.

-- 
Shawn.