UTF-8 in glibc commit messages

Adhemerval Zanella adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org
Wed Apr 14 18:16:08 GMT 2021



On 14/04/2021 15:08, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 4/14/21 8:01 AM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> can't we be proactive ?  let's go all-in on UTF-8.
> 
> A problem with "all-in" is that UTF-8 has weird characters that can mess things up. The commit message check was originally put in because someone copy-pasted U+2069 POP DIRECTIONAL ISOLATE into a commit message without realizing it. That invisible character breaks simple searches like 'grep -w'.
> 
> glibc's current check isn't quite right either, as it allows lines like this:
> 
>     Reviewed-by: Adhemerval Zanella  <adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org>
> 
> in which each "space" is actually U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE. Although that's valid ISO-8895-15, U+00A0 is another weird character that we arguably shouldn't allow as it can also mess up searches (it's even blacklisted in URLs by some browsers because of the potential for phishing).

Was I the author?  If so I will check what I am doing wrong with my 
environment.

> 
> It'd be better to come up with an exact list of acceptable Unicode characters (probably a set of categories with some exceptions). This would be better than the current approach which is either too-generous or (mostly) too-restrictive. But it'd be some work.


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