Re: am fails to apply patches for files with CRLF lineendings

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 15, 2009, 02:12 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfx7d7zpp.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <ee63ef30912141650ie05baf4kab8505adf160c62e@mail.gmail.com>

Brandon Casey <drafnel@gmail.com> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

>> It actually is the norm to use LF as the line terminator in the body text
>> in saved messages (and trailing CR as a true part of the payload), and
>> "am" traditionally used that definition.  It is meant to read from "mbox"
>> format to begin with.
>
> But isn't each email in the mbox file supposed to be RFC-2822 formatted
> anyway?

If you are talking about the same "mbox" I was talking about, which is what I see when I peek "/var/mail/junio", then the answer is no. Their lines are terminated with a LF, and if you insert CR at the end of the line it would appear as true payload. DOSsy boxes can have C:\mail\user or whatever that has DOS text, of course, so there is no "supposed to be".

Having said that, it does not matter an iota in the real world if somebody declares on _this list_ that it a bug that Thunderbird spits out CRLF text in response to "Save As..." on platforms where LF is the natural line terminator [*1*]. Whether it is a bug or not, we still need to help people with such a program without breaking others.

I saw "peeking the line ending of the first line" as suggested as a solution, and my gut feeling, without thinking too much about it, is that it is likely to be the right thing to do, especially if we do both the check and the necessary conversion in either mailinfo or even in mailsplit.

[Footnote]

*1* It is a different matter if it was done on _their_ mailing list, and it would even be better if such a discussion on _their_ mailing list resulted in a fix over there.