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 20:51:03 +0100

On 09.02.2009 20:30, Brandon Casey wrote:
> Did you try it with the message I sent titled
> '[PATCH] example patch corrupted by thunderbird'?

I tried now, and none of the editors/viewers I tried are displaying 
anything that would come close to readable to me, even if you count 
clearly marked hex character codes as readable. I tried less, e3 and 
kwrite. Therefore, a) I can't verify whether the result is correct or 
not b) I declare this an edge case.

> When I save with Thunderbird, part of what was on line 5 is now
> on another line and the control-M is missing.
> Nope, '.eml' extension.
>    

That would be a bug. If you save as .eml, it should save exactly what's 
in your IMAP mailbox or what View as source | File | Save... saves. If 
it doesn't do that, it's a bug.

The View Source workaround may be inconvenient, but is a workaround for 
such a strong edgecase, until this bug is fixed. Don't hope for it, 
though, because TB is working on completely different things, like a 
message database.

You're welcome to file a bug, but please without political statements or 
broad generic demands. TB is geared towards comfortable writing and 
reading of human language text.

---

Apart from that, I can only recommend that you re-consider sending 
patches as inline attachments (Content-Disposition: inline, which is an 
official Internet Standard since many years), which is IMHO correctly 
reflecting reality, and fixing the software which can't deal with 
*that*, including inline display and quoting.

Ben