Re: [PATCH] format-patch: teach --no-encode-headers

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 7, 2020, 20:31 UTC
Message-ID: <20200407203111.GA1936475@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq8sj7t7d0.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On Tue, Apr 07, 2020 at 12:37:31PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> Emma Brooks <me@pluvano.com> writes:
> 
> > It's also too vague and it's not entirely clear from the option itself
> > what sort of encoding it refers to. I will change it to
> > --[no-]q-encode-headers and format.qEncodeHeaders in v2 unless there are
> > other suggestions.
> 
> I actually did not mean to push you into that direction.  We can,
> and do want to, keep the most generic "--[no-]encode-headers" if we
> do not anticipate us wanting to special case the Q encoding.  A
> sample question to ask is "would it make sense to disable q-encoding
> but still perform other parts of 'encode headers'?"  I haven't
> thought deeply about such questions, but as a proposer of this
> topic, you would certainly have, and I was hoping that you'd say
> things like "Q-encoding is the only thing that we do to munge
> headers, so there aren't any 'other parts of encoding headers' we
> need to worry about", "there are things like X, Y and Z that we do
> to the headers when we enable Q-encoding, but they all are what we
> do not want when we do not want the Q-encoding", which would be a
> very good sign that assures us that "--[no-]encode-headers" is a
> good name.

I thought we might b-encode some headers, but couldn't find any code to do so (after about 5 minutes of looking).

However, this new option isn't just for format-patch. It is available for all revision walkers (as it should be; I can say "log --format=email" and I might want to use it there). And there "headers" is less clear that we are talking about email headers, and not other object headers (e.g., that you might see with --format=raw).

Saying "--no-rfc2047-encoding" would be more descriptive to _me_, but I wonder if people not so familiar with the standards would find it a bit obscure. Another option is to invert it to "--8bit-email-headers" or something.

-Peff