Subject: Re: [Virtual PATCH] Add an option to wrap a patch in <pre> in git-imap-send which ironically results in a cleaner patch from Thunderbird.

From: Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:24:16 +0100

Junio C Hamano venit, vidit, dixit 13.02.2009 05:19:
> I do not think of a reason, other than to trigger the workaround you
> mentioned in the documentation part of the patch, why any sane user would
> want to send a patch as HTML.  This configuration variable sounds more
> like "imap.forceThunderbirdToSendNonFlowedTextByExploitingItsBug" than
> "imap.html", in other words.
> 
> What worries me the most is if there is any guarantee that this bug you
> are exploiting to force it to send a patch in the common denominator
> format _will not be fixed_ in future versions of Thunderbird.

It's not a bug, it's a feature ;)

In fact it really is: preformatted text in HTML (<pre>) is by definition
left alone. Now, when you are about to send an HTML mail TB asks you
what to do (or takes a choice from preferences/addressbook): send as
HTML, as text or both.

The fact that the current HTML->text converter respects preformated text
without reflowing (and without f-f, which would allow reflowing on the
receiving side) is a feature. TB trys to represent the HTML in text form
as closely as possible.

> I see your patch deals only with ampersand, less-than, greater-than and
> dquot.  Do you know if this is enough, or would letters outside US-ASCII
> need to be expressed in ampersand-hash "character reference" notation?

According to Ben of Mozilla fame this is enough for special characters.
I don't know about UTF-8, though. Usually, TB recognizes the proper
encoding.

Michael J Gruber