Thanks for paying a very close attention to what is in 'pu'. The series was a work in progress not yet ready for publication, which I merged by mistake because I was way too sleepy. There are three reasons (and a half -- it was not even compile tested) that I did not mean to merge it yet. - I did not want to break existing git implementations, but hadn't audited the commit header parsers to see if they do not get upset when they see unrecognized header fields in commit objects. The 'trailer' was just a quick hack to have something working for me to test the output conversion code. I've looked at the code since then and I think it is Ok to add new ones after author/name fields like you did. If we _were_ to do this, I think it is preferable to make it a header, not a trailer like I did. - I was not sure if the "assume the whole commit->buffer is in the local encoding and recode it into UTF-8" is correct. The message body ought to be in i18n.commitencoding from the repository the commit comes from, which is now recorded in the trailer (or the header as in your patch), but what I was unsure about was the encoding in which author and committer names are recorded. I think they are set either by the environment variables or user.name to be consistent with i18n.commitencoding in the repository the commit is made, so it is Ok after all. - Existing Porcelains such as gitk know i18n.commitencoding is a hint to them by the core, and expect the core to give them output in the local encoding. With the change, the core feeds UTF-8 to the caller, unless the Porcelain gets the log with plumbing "cat-file". This means they either have to lose code to do their own recoding (which is probably a good thing in the long run), or we would need to have a flag for them to tell the core not to do the conversion. But a new flag to ask for older behaviour is always a wrong way of transitioning across backward incompatibility. I think the output conversion from the log should be more explicitly asked for it, than just a mere configuration variable that cannot be overriden by gitk and friends. - To unsubscribe from this list: 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