Re: [PATCH] git-send-email.perl: check for lines longer than 998 characters

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 20, 2008, 22:53 UTC
Message-ID: <20080120225313.GA14762@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <4793CCA2.4060407@users.sourceforge.net>

On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 11:35:14PM +0100, Adam Piatyszek wrote:

> I support this idea. "git-format-patch --attach" is a good place to  
> implement such an additional encoding. Of course, git-mailinfo needs to  
> be extended with a decoding method as well.

I think mailinfo already does support qp, but I haven't tested it (see builtin-mailinfo.c:decode_q_segment).

Show 8 quoted lines

>> *1* It's actually second-to-root-cause it, because the real root
>> cause is for the source tree to have such an insanely long line.
> I can not fully agree with this statement. You should have in mind that  
> git is by the definition a "stupid content tracker" and should not assume 
> any particular kind of data being processed.
> For instance, the reported problem with git-send-email was discovered  
> when I tried to send a patch with some reference data of an unformatted  
> standard output of a test program.

I agree with you. One of the things that makes git so useful is that you can feed it any content and everything "just works".

That being said, there is often a distinction in git between 'text' that is reasonable for patches, mailing, etc, and 'binary', which is not. Both cases are handled by git, but in different ways appropriate to each. 1000-character lines are awfully long; should they perhaps be handled as binary files? The upside is that this fits them into a well-established niche within git. The downside is that the diffs aren't readable (though who is reading diffs with such long lines?) and I don't believe the conflict resolution is as simple.

-Peff