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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/i18n.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/i18n.txt | 57 |
1 files changed, 57 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/i18n.txt b/Documentation/i18n.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..1e188e6e74 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/i18n.txt @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic. + + - The pathnames recorded in the index and in the tree objects + are treated as uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes. + What readdir(2) returns are what are recorded and compared + with the data git keeps track of, which in turn are expected + to be what lstat(2) and creat(2) accepts. There is no such + thing as pathname encoding translation. + + - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequence + of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core + level. + + - The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequence of non-NUL + bytes. + +Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded +in UTF-8, both the core and git Porcelain are designed not to +force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular +project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, git +does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in +mind. + +. `git-commit-tree` (hence, `git-commit` which uses it) issues + a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look + like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your + project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to + have i18n.commitencoding in `.git/config` file, like this: ++ +------------ +[i18n] + commitencoding = ISO-8859-1 +------------ ++ +Commit objects created with the above setting record the value +of `i18n.commitencoding` in its `encoding` header. This is to +help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header +implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8. + +. `git-log`, `git-show` and friends looks at the `encoding` + header of a commit object, and tries to re-code the log + message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can + specify the desired output encoding with + `i18n.logoutputencoding` in `.git/config` file, like this: ++ +------------ +[i18n] + logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1 +------------ ++ +If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of +`i18n.commitencoding` is used instead. + +Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log +message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit +object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a +reversible operation. |