Re: [PATCH] send-email: ask about and declare 8bit mails

From: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Date: Jun 13, 2010, 15:09 UTC
Message-ID: <201006131709.55335.trast@student.ethz.ch>
In-Reply-To: <7vljakfc64.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>  (2) otherwise, if there is an 8-bit encoding involved in the paths,
>      perhaps mark the entire message as 8-bit (binary???).
> 
> I have this suspicion that (2) is very rare (you cannot transmit such a
> patch as a plain text message reliably afaict, so it is not done in
> practice), and we would probably need to make a separate patchfile for
> groups of paths in each encoding and attach them as MIME multiparts (ugh).

So IIUC this would be the main/first obstacle? Seeing as we seem to do fine here but you both say 8bit is not reliable. (According to Wikipedia[*] all the big names support it though...)

Perhaps Quoted-Printable would work with minimal effort? We could leave it to send-email to do all the quoting, mailsplit or am all the unquoting and we retain (mostly) the readability of the original patches.

That still doesn't solve the problem that we might send (invalid utf8) binary data declared as utf8. I suppose to work around that, a more elaborate approach like

Show 10 quoted lines

>  (0) use the attributes mechanism to allow projects to mark paths with
>      encoding.  E.g.
> 
> 	# everything in UTF-8 unless otherwise specified...
>         * encoding=UTF-8
>         Documentation/zh_CN/* encoding=big5
> 
>  (1) for each patch, find the paths involved, and if their encodings are
>      the same, perhaps promote that as the encoding used for the entire
>      message;

is needed.

[*] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8BITMIME#8BITMIME

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch