What windows CVS clients support proper handling of encoding in comments?

Question

We're currently using tortoisecvs (1.8.31) to commit/access our cvs repositories.

We've recently wanted to support Japanese text in comments, so that viewvc can be used for browsing. However, it doesn't appear that you can set the encoding of comments being sent by Tortoisecvs are properly converted/sent as UTF8.

Example of Tortoisecvs output:

In D:\Workspace\dummy\src: "C:\Program Files\TortoiseCVS\cvs.exe" -q commit -m コミットテスト日本語 dummy.py
CVSROOT=:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/dummy

/cvsroot/dummy/src/dummy.py,v  <--  dummy.py
new revision: 1.10; previous revision: 1.9

/opt/viewvc-1.0.5/lib/cvsdb.py:198: Warning: Incorrect string value: '\x83R\x83~\x83b...' for column 'description' at row 1
  cursor.execute(sql, sql_args)

I've confirmed that the cvs repository/viewvc supports japanese by committing through Eclipse, where you can define the encoding of comments being sent to the repository. But, most of our development isn't done in eclipse.

Is there a way to get tortoisecvs to assign the proper encoding to comments? Or, if it's commandline related issue, is there a way to change windows to default to utf-8? (Would that fix it?) (Tortoisecvs seems like it's just calling a command line tool, which I'm assuming then just applies the default system's encoding to the text)

If not, what windows CVS clients (if any) support proper handling of encoding in comments?

Update Removed SVN, tested and SVN correctly handles encoding and transmits comments in UTF-8. Thanks, Stefan for clarifying this.

Found this request in the tortosiecvs project on sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1592167&group_id=48103&atid=451975

It's been open since 2006. I guess it's not a big issue for a lot of people.

Answer 1

I don't know any client but have you reported a bug against tortoisecvs/svn? It might be easy enough to fix.

Answer 2

Subversion clients are required to pass all strings utf-8 encoded to the underlying API and therefore to the server. TortoiseSVN definitely does this. As does every other SVN client I tried (and isn't two years old).

But of course, you can only enter/show japanese comments if the corresponding fonts are installed on the machine.

If you could specify an encoding in eclipse before committing to an SVN repository, then that's a bug in eclipse (or the eclipse plugin responsible for SVN access). Because, as I mentioned SVN clients must use utf-8 encoded strings