Documentation/i18n.txt

   1 At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic.
   2
   3  - The pathnames recorded in the index and in the tree objects
   4    are treated as uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes.
   5    What readdir(2) returns are what are recorded and compared
   6    with the data git keeps track of, which in turn are expected
   7    to be what lstat(2) and creat(2) accepts.  There is no such
   8    thing as pathname encoding translation.
   9
  10  - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequence
  11    of bytes.  There is no encoding translation at the core
  12    level.
  13
  14  - The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequence of non-NUL
  15    bytes.
  16
  17 Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded
  18 in UTF-8, both the core and git Porcelain are designed not to
  19 force UTF-8 on projects.  If all participants of a particular
  20 project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, git
  21 does not forbid it.  However, there are a few things to keep in
  22 mind.
  23
  24 . `git-commit-tree` (hence, `git-commit` which uses it) issues
  25   an warning if the commit log message given to it does not look
  26   like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your
  27   project uses a legacy encoding.  The way to say this is to
  28   have core.commitencoding in `.git/config` file, like this:
  29 +
  30 ------------
  31 [core]
  32         commitencoding = ISO-8859-1
  33 ------------
  34 +
  35 Commit objects created with the above setting record the value
  36 of `core.commitencoding` in its `encoding` header.  This is to
  37 help other people who look at them later.  Lack of this header
  38 implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.
  39
  40 . `git-log`, `git-show` and friends looks at the `encoding`
  41   header of a commit object, and tries to re-code the log
  42   message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified.  You can
  43   specify the desired output encoding with
  44   `core.logoutputencoding` in `.git/config` file, like this:
  45 +
  46 ------------
  47 [core]
  48         logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1
  49 ------------
  50 +
  51 If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of
  52 `core.commitencoding` is used instead.
  53
  54 Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log
  55 message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit
  56 object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a
  57 reversible operation.