Re: textconv not invoked when viewing merge commit

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

OK, but what do you intend to do for a plumbing command _without_
--textconv? I think what it is doing now (pretending that lines in the
binary file are relevant, and either truncating output on NUL or spewing
NULs to the output stream) is just wrong.

Oh, no question about it.  "Binary files differ" codepath needs to be
added, and independent of if we want to add a fallback textconv.

Ick, why? That pseudo-diff contains no additional interesting
information that is not already there (since the "index" line already
contains the blob sha1s).

True enough.

The only case that might make a difference would be if one side was binary
and the other side and the result was text, in which case the user can not
just see but read the result, but I don't think it is worth caring about.

Also unlike my weatherbaloon patch, Michael's approach (if it is updated
to pass the whole diff options structure instead of just one "do we care
about the textconv" bit to intersect_paths() function) will let us
determine if the combined path should say "Binary files differ" a lot
early, so there is no need to worry about what to do on binary files in
the places we would be adding textconv anymore.