Re: [PATCH] Added --export option to git-send-email.

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 13, 2008, 21:44 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b130807131444s5e9ea0d6v9610dd5871467fc9@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vbq11qxfb.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

On 7/13/08, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

>  >> Sorry, but I am scratching my head here.  Shouldn't this "bare From
>  >>  munging" be like this instead?
>  >>
>  >>                 $message =~ s/^From />From /m;
>  >
>  > That wouldn't be a reversible operation.
>
> So what?  Adding Cc: and stuff send-email does are already irreversible
>  anyway.

At one point the people who write mailers realized that just munging "From" to ">From" when putting things into an mbox was irreversible, ie, there was no way to later display the contents of the mbox without showing ">From" where "From" was intended.

However, if you always insert _another_ ">" whenever "^>*From" is detected, then you can also always do the opposite upon displaying to the user, and the message is effectively not munged. It becomes simply a part of the mbox file encoding.

So by encoding it this way, someone with a modern mailer could view the resulting mbox with all the munged text de-mungled. Someone without a modern mailer would see munging anyhow, so they're no worse off.

Have fun,

Avery