Re: [RFC 0/1] mailinfo: de-quote quoted-pair in header fields

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 14, 2016, 05:13 UTC
Message-ID: <20160914051305.vphknpsikyxi3hg3@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20160913234612.22806-2-me@ikke.info>

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 01:46:12AM +0200, Kevin Daudt wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> diff --git a/t/t5100/quoted-pair.expect b/t/t5100/quoted-pair.expect
> new file mode 100644
> index 0000000..9fe72e9
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/t/t5100/quoted-pair.expect
> @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
> +Author: "Author "The Author" Name"
> +Email: somebody@example.com
> +Subject: testing quoted-pair
> +Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 00:38:18 -0700

So obviously this is much better than including the backslashed quotes. But I have to wonder why the first line is not:

  Author: Author "The Author" Name

Who is responsible for stripping out the other quotes? I know that they _do_ get stripped out even in the current code, but it is not clear to me if that is intentional or an accident.

In Git's world-view (e.g., in commit headers), an ident name continues until we get to the "<" of the email (or a "\n" terminates the header line completely). So if mailinfo is converting rfc2822 headers into Git ident, I'd expect it to fully remove any quotes that are not intended to be in the name, and everything after "Author: " up to the newline would become the name.

It's entirely possible I'm missing something subtle about the design of mailinfo, though.

-Peff