Re: svn log behaves strangely when characters cannot be represented in the local charset

On 2008-02-18 15:49:21 +0100, Branko Čibej wrote:
> Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>> On 2008-02-18 13:05:06 +0100, Branko Čibej wrote:
>>> Subversion will convert that to you locale's encoding if it can; if
>>> not, it will "transliterate" (but not really; we need a real
>>> transliterating iconv).
>>
>> No, transliterating does not work with svn (though iconv is OK):
>
> Please don't be deliberately obtuse. We don't do transliteration because
> we don't try to determine if the provided iconv supports it. What you
> see is deliberate; not nice and sexy, but deliberate and not a bug.

Well, what you said earlier was ambiguous. But this isn't
user-friendly. And you do *not* need a transliterating iconv to
make it better. For instance,

  Test caractère non ISO-8859-1: ?\226?\134?\146

would be better than:

  Test caract?\195?\168re non ISO-8859-1: ?\226?\134?\146

i.e. transliterate only the characters that are not representable
in the local charset.

>> some kind of warning or other way to inform the user would be
>> useful, because some information is lost after a transliteration.
>
> So what? Who cares about "some information lost" in a log message
> printed to the console?

Who said that log messages are always printed to the console?
Perhaps you should know about file redirections. It's not obvious
to know that information has been lost in a 1-MB file generated
this way. Sensible software warns the user about possible problems
(e.g. this is the case of iconv and emacs) or at least document
what they are doing (the Subversion documentation is silent). In
particular, svn usually gives errors when it finds problems related
to the charset, so why not with "svn log"? This doesn't seem to be
very consistent.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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