Subject: Re: Thunderbird and patches (was Re: [PATCH v2] Enable setting attach as the default in .gitconfig for git-format-patch.)

From: Ben Bucksch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:09:41 +0100

On 09.02.2009 19:54, Brandon Casey wrote:
> I will follow up with an example patch which has the control characters in
> it.
>    

I can only advise against sending patches in the bodies, sorry. Bodies 
are for human-language text. Attachments are for files like diffs, and 
are preserved. Attachments with "Content-Disposition: inline" are for 
attachments which are supposed to be read directly in the email reader, 
like is the case here.

I guess that other, console-based email software won't deal with inline 
attachments as nicely, but the major email clients do. Instead of trying 
to do something that's going to be fruitless - email bodies are never 
going to be character-to-character identical, because there are many 
demands on formatting (up to graphical smiles) and from many different 
languages (charsets, like seems to be the problem here) on it by users 
-, I think your better route for success would be to use inline 
attachments and fix the software which can't deal with *that* properly, 
including display and quoting.

Sorry to brush you off, but I this is a battle we can't win, either way. 
Too many demands from too many sides.

Ben