Re: OT: character encodings (was: Linux 2.6.20-rc4)

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 15:05 -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
> This has been bugging me for a while.
> Viewing the mail I applied in mutt shows his name correctly as Rafał
> Applying it with git-applymbox and viewing the log on master.kernel.org
> with git log shows Rafa<B3>   And then later when put into email
> it turns into Rafa³ 

I believe you need to use the misnamed '-u' option to git-applymbox,
which _really_ ought to be the default behaviour. Otherwise, it fails to
pay any attention to the character set tags in the mail it's decoding --
it commits the sin which rmk was whining about; assuming the input data
is of a given type and ignoring the explicit tags which indicate the
contrary.

The '-u' option is misdocumented as 'causes the resulting commit to be
encoded in utf-8', but in fact I believe it doesn't necessarily do that
-- it actually causes the resulting commit to be encoded in the
configured storage charset for the repository, which just _happens_ to
default to UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. That is something which
should definitely be the _default_ behaviour.

We should make the '-u' behaviour the default, and if anyone really
wants the old behaviour of importing arbitrary data in untagged 
binary form overriding its labelling then they can have a separate
option which does that.

-- 
dwmw2