Re: [PATCH v1] convert: add support for 'encoding' attribute

On 11 Dec 2017, at 21:47, Johannes Sixt [off-list ref] wrote:

Am 11.12.2017 um 16:50 schrieb lars.schneider@autodesk.com:

quoted

From: Lars Schneider <redacted>
Git and its tools (e.g. git diff) expect all text files in UTF-8
encoding. Git will happily accept content in all other encodings, too,
but it might not be able to process the text (e.g. viewing diffs or
changing line endings).
Add an attribute to tell Git what encoding the user has defined for a
given file. If the content is added to the index, then Git converts the
content to a canonical UTF-8 representation. On checkout Git will
reverse the conversion.
Reviewed-by: Patrick Lühne <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Lars Schneider <redacted>
---
Hi,
here is a WIP patch to add text encoding support for files encoded with
something other than UTF-8 [RFC].
The 'encoding' attribute is already used to view blobs in gitk. That
could be a problem as the content is stored in Git with the defined
encoding. This patch would interpret the content as UTF-8 encoded and

This will be a major drawback for me because my code base stores text files that are not UTF-8 encoded. And I do use the existing 'encoding' attribute to view the text in git-gui and gitk. Repurposing this attribute name is not an option, IMO.

I understand your point of view and I kind of expected that that reply.
Thanks for the feedback!

Question is: Given that "encoding" is not available, how could I name
             the attribute without confusing the user?

I contemplated:
  - "enc" or "encode" because "eol" and "ident" use abbreviations, too
    (enc could be confused with encryption. plus, a user might ask
     what is the difference between "enc" and "encoding" attribute :-)
  - "wte", "wtenc", or "worktree-encoding" to emphasize that this is 
    the encoding used in the worktree 
    (I fear that users think that is git-worktree, the command, related)

I think my favorite is "worktree-encoding".
What do you think?

Thanks,
Lars 


BTW: I am curios, can you share what encoding you use?
My main use case is UTF-16 and I was surprised that I haven't
found a single public repo on github.com with "encoding=utf-16"