Documentation: i18n commit log message notes.

Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>

5 files changed, 78 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/git-commit-tree.txt b/Documentation/git-commit-tree.txt
index 41d1a1c4b3..77ba96ed8a 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-commit-tree.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-commit-tree.txt
@@ -81,6 +81,11 @@ Your parents must have hated you!::
 Your sysadmin must hate you!::
     The password(5) name field is longer than a giant static buffer.
 
+Discussion
+----------
+
+include::i18n.txt[]
+
 See Also
 --------
 gitlink:git-write-tree[1]
diff --git a/Documentation/git-commit.txt b/Documentation/git-commit.txt
index 0b74cd708e..a7adf24fa5 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-commit.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-commit.txt
@@ -223,6 +223,11 @@ should be recorded as a single commit.  In fact, the command
 refuses to run when given pathnames (but see `-i` option).
 
 
+DISCUSSION
+----------
+
+include::i18n.txt[]
+
 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
 ---------------------
 The command specified by either the VISUAL or EDITOR environment
diff --git a/Documentation/git-log.txt b/Documentation/git-log.txt
index 79643ac928..c87133542a 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-log.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-log.txt
@@ -63,6 +63,12 @@ git log -r --name-status release..test::
 	in the "release" branch, along with the list of paths
 	each commit modifies.
 
+Discussion
+----------
+
+include::i18n.txt[]
+
+
 Author
 ------
 Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
diff --git a/Documentation/git-show.txt b/Documentation/git-show.txt
index 98dea6125d..160abb5b24 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-show.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-show.txt
@@ -54,6 +54,11 @@ git show master:Makefile master:t/Makefile
 	Concatenates the contents of said Makefiles in the head
 	of the branch `master`.
 
+Discussion
+----------
+
+include::i18n.txt[]
+
 Author
 ------
 Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> and
diff --git a/Documentation/i18n.txt b/Documentation/i18n.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..b4cbb3830e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/i18n.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic.
+
+ - The pathnames recorded in the index and in the tree objects
+   are treated as uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes.
+   What readdir(2) returns are what are recorded and compared
+   with the data git keeps track of, which in turn are expected
+   to be what lstat(2) and creat(2) accepts.  There is no such
+   thing as pathname encoding translation.
+
+ - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequence
+   of bytes.  There is no encoding translation at the core
+   level.
+
+ - The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequence of non-NUL
+   bytes.
+
+Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded
+in UTF-8, both the core and git Porcelain are designed not to
+force UTF-8 on projects.  If all participants of a particular
+project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, git
+does not forbid it.  However, there are a few things to keep in
+mind.
+
+. `git-commit-tree` (hence, `git-commit` which uses it) issues
+  an warning if the commit log message given to it does not look
+  like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your
+  project uses a legacy encoding.  The way to say this is to
+  have core.commitencoding in `.git/config` file, like this:
++
+------------
+[core]
+	commitencoding = ISO-8859-1
+------------
++
+Commit objects created with the above setting record the value
+of `core.commitencoding` in its `encoding` header.  This is to
+help other people who look at them later.  Lack of this header
+implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.
+
+. `git-log`, `git-show` and friends looks at the `encoding`
+  header of a commit object, and tries to re-code the log
+  message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified.  You can
+  specify the desired output encoding with
+  `core.logoutputencoding` in `.git/config` file, like this:
++
+------------
+[core]
+	logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1
+------------
++
+If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of
+`core.commitencoding` is used instead.
+
+Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log
+message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit
+object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a
+reversible operation.