Proposal: Use UTF-8 encoding & LF (Unix) end-of-line

[iperdomo]

Context

The source code is using ASCII encoding with CRLF (windows) end of lines. When looking at diff, you find those characters ^M, e.g.

Change

• Convert all those files to UTF-8 & LF (Unix) eol with dos2unix
• Configure the repository with .gitattributes to do the LF conversion (if nececesary) at git level
  • e.g. https://github.com/alexkaratarakis/gitattributes/blob/master/Java.gitattributes

There are changes that require modification in the developer machine.

• Configure your Eclipse IDE to use UTF-8 file encoding with Unix end-of-line
• Configure your Eclipse IDE to remote trailing white-spaces

Some of this IDE settings can be recorded in a Preferences file

[iperdomo]

Other projects (bigger) also propose this 🤓 - https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8301971

This includes basically the following steps:

• Tell git that the text files are encoded in UTF-8
• Look through the code base for text files containing non-ASCII characters, and convert them to UTF-8, if they are not already
• Update tooling used in building to recognize the fact that files are now in UTF-8 and treat them accordingly (basically, updating compiler flags).