On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 12:03:06PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote: > And from that point of view, perhaps w-t-e attribute is somewhat > misdesigned. > > In general, an attribute is about the project's contents in the > manner independent of platform or environment. You define "this > file is a C source" or "this file has JPEG image" there. What exact > program you use to present diffs between the two versions of such a > file (external diff command) or what exact program you use to > extract the textual representations (textconv filter) is environment > and platform dependent and is left to the configuration mechanism > for each repository. > > To be in line with the above design principle, I think the attribute > ought to be "the in-tree contents of this path is encoded in ..." > whose values could be things like UTF-8, ShiftJIS, etc. What > external encoding the paths should be checked out is not a > project-wide matter, especially when talking about cross platform > projects. Perhaps a project in Japanese language wants to check > out its contents in EUC-jp on Unices and in ShiftJIS on DOS derived > systems. The participants all need to know what in-repository > encoding is used, which is a sensible use of attributes. They also > need to know what the recommended external encoding to be used in > the working tree is for their platforms, but that is more like what > Makefile variable to set for their platforms, etc., and is not a > good match to the attributes system.
While I agree what you're saying philosophically here, I suspect you'd still need another attribute for "no really, this needs to be checked out as encoding X". The same way we treat line endings as a platform decision, but we still need to have `eol=crlf` for those files which really, no matter what platform you're on, have external tools depending on them to have some particular line ending. So a full proposal would support both cases: "check this out in the local platform's preferred encoding" and "always check this out in _this_ encoding". And Lars's proposal is just the second half of that. But I'm not sure anybody even really cares about the first part; I don't think we've seen anybody actually ask for it. -Peff
