Subject: Re: PATCH: Allow format-patch to attach patches

From: Mike McCormack <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:20:38 +0900

Junio C Hamano wrote:

> The only two and half minor issues I might have about this are:
> 
>  (1) is the type text/x-patch appropriate?

I'm no expert on MIME types, unfortunately.  Maybe text/x-diff makes 
more sense?   A few different projects require one of those two types 
for diffs sent as attachments.  My main concern is that mailers can 
recognize that the attachment is text, then displayed with the message 
so that people can see the patch without opening the attachment.

>  (2) is it possible to cheaply come up with a safe mime-magic,
>      instead of a hardcoded long string and hope it does not
>      clash?

I agree that using a hardcoded long string isn't that great.  Reading 
all of the "diff-tree -p" output seems a bit expensive.  How about using 
   some part of the patch's SHA1 combined with date/time?

> The remaining half issue is if would it make sense to sometimes
> optionally use non 8-bit CTE for the patch part.

Maybe allow something like:

git-format-patch --attach=quoted-printable

where the default would be 8bit.  This require adding a perl script for 
each Content-Transfer-Encoding that we support.

Mike