freshlybakedca.ke
Git fork
1Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.
2
3 - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences
4 of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core
5 level.
6
7 - Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This
8 applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as
9 path names in command line arguments, environment variables
10 and config files (`.git/config` (see linkgit:git-config[1]),
11 linkgit:gitignore[5], linkgit:gitattributes[5] and
12 linkgit:gitmodules[5]).
13+
14Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as
15sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding
16conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using
17non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file
18systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However,
19repositories created on such systems will not work properly on
20UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa.
21Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to
22be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.
23
24 - Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other
25 extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes
26 ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but _not_ UTF-16/32,
27 EBCDIC and CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5,
28 EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).
29
30Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded
31in UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to
32force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular
33project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git
34does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in
35mind.
36
37. `git commit` and `git commit-tree` issue
38 a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look
39 like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your
40 project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to
41 have `i18n.commitEncoding` in `.git/config` file, like this:
42+
43------------
44[i18n]
45 commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1
46------------
47+
48Commit objects created with the above setting record the value
49of `i18n.commitEncoding` in their `encoding` header. This is to
50help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header
51implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.
52
53. `git log`, `git show`, `git blame` and friends look at the
54 `encoding` header of a commit object, and try to re-code the
55 log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can
56 specify the desired output encoding with
57 `i18n.logOutputEncoding` in `.git/config` file, like this:
58+
59------------
60[i18n]
61 logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1
62------------
63+
64If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of
65`i18n.commitEncoding` is used instead.
66
67Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log
68message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit
69object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a
70reversible operation.