Re: git-p4 crashes on non UTF-8 output from p4

["Torsten Bögershausen" <tboegi@web.de>]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2021 at 12:28:25PM -0700, Tzadik Vanderhoof wrote:
> When git-p4 reads the output from a p4 command, it assumes it will be
> 100% UTF-8. If even one character in the output of one p4 command is
> not UTF-8, git-p4 crashes with:
>
> File "C:/Program Files/Git/bin/git-p4.py", line 774, in p4CmdList
>     value = value.decode() UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't
> decode byte Ox93 in position 42: invalid start byte
>
> I'd like to make a pull request to have it try another encoding (eg
> cp1252) and/or use the Unicode replacement character, to prevent the
> whole program from crashing on such a minor problem.
>
> This is especially a problem on the "git p4 clone" command with @all,
> where git-p4 needs to read thousands of changeset descriptions, one of
> which may have a stray smart quote, causing the whole clone operation
> to fail.
>
> Sound ok?

Welcome to the Git community.
To start with: I am not a git-p4 expert as such, but seeing that a program is crashing
is never a good thing.
All efforts to prevent the crash are a step forward.

As you mention cp1252 (which is more used under Windows), there are probably lots of
system out there which use ISO-8859-15 (or ISO-8859-1) we may have the first whish:

Make the encoding/fallback configurable.
Let people choose if they want a crash (if things are broken),
fallback to cp1252 or one of the other ISO-ISO-8859-x encodings.

In that sense: we look forward to a pull-request.