On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 12:23:29PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Hi Elijah,

On Sat, 11 May 2019, Elijah Newren wrote:

quoted

[...] the craziness is based on how Windows behaves; it seems insane to
me that Windows decides to munge user data (in the form of the command
line provided), so much so that it makes me wonder if I really
understood Hannes' and Dscho's explanations of what it is doing.

It is not the user data that is munged by *Windows*, but by *Git for
Windows*. The user data on Windows is encoded in UTF-16 (or some slight
variant thereof). Git *cannot* handle UTF-16. Git's test suite *cannot*
handle UTF-16. So we convert. That's all there is to it.

Ciao,
Dscho

P.S.: Of course it is not *all* there is to it. There is also a current
code page which depends on the current user's current locale. We can
definitely not rely on that, as Git has no idea about this and would quite
positively produce incorrect output because of it. So we really just use
the `*W()` functions of the Win32 API (i.e. the ones accepting wide
Unicode characters and strings, i.e. UTF-16). I don't think we can do
better than that.

We can actuall feed valid UTF-8 into a test case.
(Remember that shell scripts need this octal numbering, see
t/t0050)


See the "ä" code point:
$ auml=$(printf '\303\244')
$ printf $auml
ä


Now we can feed those 2 bytes (wich are valid UTF) into
Git and say "convert them from ISO-8859-1 into UTF-8,
resulting in 4 bytes.
Is my explanation clear enough ?
If not, plese tell me.