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

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 13, 2008, 23:42 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b130807131642k1382cf84gdf5e8bb8d2ff4ffe@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vlk05o14i.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>

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

Show 11 quoted lines

>  If this additional option claims to produce a mbox, I think:
>
>   (1) quoting only /^From / (not /^>*From/) to be consistent with the
>      standard practice is the right thing to do; and
>
>   (2) reading side might need to also pay attention to /^>From /, in case
>      somebody feeds an output from this option back to send-email.
>
>  However, strictly speaking,(2) may break the standard workflow of
>  generating patches with format-patch and feeding the result to send-email,
>  as format-patch does not do /^From / munging (and it shouldn't).

Note that it's generally very bad practice to do (2) unless you always quote /^>*From/. Quoting only /^From/ and *then* trying to dequote it correctly actually increases the number of places where you can corrupt a message. As a sign that very few programs do (2), I think it's pretty clear that a lot more people see "From" rewritten as ">From" in their mail app of choice than the reverse.

There is also some debate about what "standard practice" means. See: http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html .

If git is going to start actually producing mbox files (as opposed to just individual messages as it does now), it should probably explicitly take a stance on the issue... or perhaps make it configurable.

Have fun,

Avery