Re: [PATCH/RFC] log doc: explain --encoding=none and default output encoding

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
> ---
> I'm not thrilled with the wording.  This can probably be explained
> more simply.  Ideas?

Some random thoughts on text, both before and after this patch.

 - The first stentence in this paragraph up to the semicolon is
   irrelevant (it is an implementation detail that allows us to
   re-encode in the first place, and the user does not care).

 - The use of word "default" is fuzzy.  With this description, we
   want to tell the user to what encoding we reencode to by default,
   but it is easy to miss that the reencoding always happen for
   output with or without --encoding=<anything> option (which is not
   clear from the text, especially the original) and incorrectly
   assume that without --encoding=<anything> the recorded text is
   spit out without mangling.

So perhaps along this line?

        --encoding=<encoding>::

                The encoding used to output the log messages in commit
                objects.  When this option is not given, non-plumbing
                commands output messages in the commit log encoding
                (`i18n.commitEncoding`, or UTF-8 if the configuration
                variable is not set).  `--encoding=none` lets you view the
                raw log message without any reencoding.

>
>  Documentation/pretty-options.txt | 10 ++++++++--
>  1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/Documentation/pretty-options.txt b/Documentation/pretty-options.txt
> index 5e499421..e31fd494 100644
> --- a/Documentation/pretty-options.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/pretty-options.txt
> @@ -32,8 +32,14 @@ people using 80-column terminals.
>  	The commit objects record the encoding used for the log message
>  	in their encoding header; this option can be used to tell the
>  	command to re-code the commit log message in the encoding
> -	preferred by the user.  For non plumbing commands this
> -	defaults to UTF-8.
> +	preferred by the user.  "--encoding=none" means to use the
> +	raw log message without paying attention to its encoding header.
> ++
> +For non plumbing commands, the output encoding defaults to the commit
> +encoding (as set using the `i18n.commitEncoding` variable, or UTF-8
> +by default).  This default can be overridden using the
> +`i18n.logOutputEncoding` configuration item. See linkgit:git-config[1]
> +for details.
>  
>  --notes[=<ref>]::
>  	Show the notes (see linkgit:git-notes[1]) that annotate the