Re: [Gnu-arch-users] How does arch/tla handle encodings?

[Marcus Sundman]

> > 1) Does arch/tla keep track of the type/encoding of each file?
>
> Isn't this a little out of scope for arch?

No. If arch doesn't keep track of the encoding of files then you have to 
communicate this piece of metadata information through some other channel 
(e.g. per email). A text file *always* has an encoding associated with it. 
There is no such thing as "plain text".

> I, for one, use UTF-8 on purpose sometimes, as Pango expects UTF-8
> strings. It would be very bad for these to get automatically transcoded to
> some different encoding, even when I'm using ISO-8859-1 for example.

That is a good example of where the encoding of a file is part of that 
file's semantics. Of course no transcoding would be done for such files. 
(Some verification _could_ be done, though. Since all byte sequences aren't 
valid UTF-8 string it is particularly important for such files to be 
validated.)


- Marcus Sundman