Git and --signoff, UTF-8

[Simos <simos lists googlemail com>]

There are two issues that came up at gnome-i18n and are unclear regarding git.
It would be good to get a position on this and I'll document for the GTP.

1. Do translation commits require to have a --signoff?
At the moment there is no git config option to automatically signoff
a commit, and this would make it slightly cumbersome for translators
to add manually.

2. What is the issue regarding UTF-8 in commit messages?
This is mostly an issue with names of people.
At first the reaction would be to simply use ASCII characters.

However, with git and git-send-e-mail, there will eventually be
non-ASCII person names
in commit messages.

For this, it might be good to have an overall policy for UTF-8, and
add to the documentation
something like

git config --global format.headers "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=\"utf-8\""

Then, the policy could be either to refrain from using UTF-8 if it can
be avoided or use UTF-8 at will.

Simos