On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 12:47:36PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > > The other issue is that it is assuming UTF-8 on one end of the > > conversion. But we aren't necessarily doing such a conversion; it > > depends on the commit's on-disk encoding, and the requested output > > encoding. In particular: > > > > - if both of those match, we do not need to call iconv at all (see the > > same_encoding() check in repo_logmsg_reencode()). With the patch > > above, the NO_ICONV case would start to die() when both are say > > iso8859-1, even though it currently works. > > > > - likewise, even if you have iconv support, it's possible that your > > preferred encoding is not compatible with utf8. In which case > > iconv_open() may complain, even though the actual conversion we'd > > ask it to do would succeed. > > > > I.e., I don't think there's a way to just ask iconv "does this encoding > > name by itself make any sense". You can only ask it about to/from > > combos. > > Yes, I'm not saying it covers the general problem, but that it covers > the specific complained-about issue of a completely nonsensical encoding > like "HTML". We should simply error on that on command startup, whether > or not we have any commits to visit. I definitely agree with you on the direction, and I don't mind if we don't cover every case. What I was trying to point out above though is that the patch you showed actually _regresses_ some cases, and it's hard to robustly avoid that. > So per <87ily7m1mv.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> why can't we just revert the > warning(), and then consider a good way forward that covers some/all of > these cases we've noted? Right, I agreed with that in the other thread. You may need to convince Junio. ;) TBH I am not even sure it is worth spending a lot of brain cells on the "and then consider..." part. Over all these years, we've had one report, and it simply misunderstand what "--encoding" was for. I thought it was something we could fix up easily by checking a return value, but IMHO doing it right is quite tricky because of iconv()'s limited interface, and the risk of regression outweighs the potential benefit. -Peff
