This document is part of a series on tricky choices in IPLD design.

Comparing Other Projects

git

Git makes a very similar set of choices to what IPLD has also chosen:

• UTF-8 is advised, and presumed;
• more specifically, NFC normalization is the default behavior;
• but other encodings are treated as a warning, at most;
• and existing data will never be forcibly re-encoded, since that may be lossy.

The documentation for git-commit-tree discusses character encoding behaviors of Git in greater detail.