What does --ascii option do for zip command?

In Mac OS X 10.5,

 $ man zip

shows

  -a
    --ascii
           [Systems using EBCDIC] Translate file to ASCII format.

and

 Info-ZIP                      16 June 2008 (v3.0)                      ZIP(1L)

What does it mean?

If I want to revision control som开发者_JS百科e .zip files using git and hg, what options should I consider using with zip command?

As the description says, it's only for computers that use EBCDIC. If you've never heard of EBCDIC, that won't apply to you. i.e., don't bother using --ascii.

If you're curious, EBCDIC is a family of character encodings that are totally incompatible with ASCII, used on some IBM systems.