1At the core level, git is character encoding agnostic. 2 3 - The pathnames recorded in the index and in the tree objects 4 are treated as uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes. 5 What readdir(2) returns are what are recorded and compared 6 with the data git keeps track of, which in turn are expected 7 to be what lstat(2) and creat(2) accepts. There is no such 8 thing as pathname encoding translation. 9 10 - The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequence 11 of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core 12 level. 13 14 - The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequence of non-NUL 15 bytes. 16 17Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded 18in UTF-8, both the core and git Porcelain are designed not to 19force UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular 20project find it more convenient to use legacy encodings, git 21does not forbid it. However, there are a few things to keep in 22mind. 23 24. `git-commit-tree` (hence, `git-commit` which uses it) issues 25 an warning if the commit log message given to it does not look 26 like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your 27 project uses a legacy encoding. The way to say this is to 28 have i18n.commitencoding in `.git/config` file, like this: 29+ 30------------ 31[i18n] 32 commitencoding = ISO-8859-1 33------------ 34+ 35Commit objects created with the above setting record the value 36of `i18n.commitencoding` in its `encoding` header. This is to 37help other people who look at them later. Lack of this header 38implies that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8. 39 40. `git-log`, `git-show` and friends looks at the `encoding` 41 header of a commit object, and tries to re-code the log 42 message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can 43 specify the desired output encoding with 44 `i18n.logoutputencoding` in `.git/config` file, like this: 45+ 46------------ 47[i18n] 48 logoutputencoding = ISO-8859-1 49------------ 50+ 51If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of 52`i18n.commitencoding` is used instead. 53 54Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log 55message when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit 56object level, because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a 57reversible operation.