If you apply a patch with 'git-am', it takes the raw content of the From: header, in whatever character set that happens to be, and puts that content, untagged, into the commit object. That is almost _never_ the right thing to do, surely? Raw data in untagged character sets is marginally better than line noise. We should default to the '-u' behaviour, which converts to the character set which the git repo is stored in. It's not just for converting to UTF-8, although it looks like it was in the past. Now, however, it converts to the character set defined in the configuration. So even if it's a Luddite who for some reason is sticking with an obsolete character set, it gets that right. The only option which makes sense _other_ than that would be to just stick the RFC2047-encoded original From: header into the commit, surely? -- dwmw2 - : send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html