Subject: Re: [PATCH] send-email: ask about and declare 8bit mails

From: Thomas Rast <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:09:55 +0200

Junio C Hamano wrote:
>  (2) otherwise, if there is an 8-bit encoding involved in the paths,
>      perhaps mark the entire message as 8-bit (binary???).
> 
> I have this suspicion that (2) is very rare (you cannot transmit such a
> patch as a plain text message reliably afaict, so it is not done in
> practice), and we would probably need to make a separate patchfile for
> groups of paths in each encoding and attach them as MIME multiparts (ugh).

So IIUC this would be the main/first obstacle?  Seeing as we seem to
do fine here but you both say 8bit is not reliable.  (According to
Wikipedia[*] all the big names support it though...)

Perhaps Quoted-Printable would work with minimal effort?  We could
leave it to send-email to do all the quoting, mailsplit or am all the
unquoting and we retain (mostly) the readability of the original
patches.

That still doesn't solve the problem that we might send (invalid utf8)
binary data declared as utf8.  I suppose to work around that, a more
elaborate approach like

>  (0) use the attributes mechanism to allow projects to mark paths with
>      encoding.  E.g.
> 
> 	# everything in UTF-8 unless otherwise specified...
>         * encoding=UTF-8
>         Documentation/zh_CN/* encoding=big5
> 
>  (1) for each patch, find the paths involved, and if their encodings are
>      the same, perhaps promote that as the encoding used for the entire
>      message;

is needed.

[*] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8BITMIME#8BITMIME

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch