Re: [PATCH] Teach applymbox to keep the Subject: line.

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Aug 17, 2005, 20:42 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfyt8thv2.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0508171253190.3553@g5.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

Show 6 quoted lines

> The fact is, anybody who doesn't edit the emails that come in is BROKEN. 
> There are two kinds of emails:
>
>  - the nicely formatted ones where the author follows all the rules
>
>    This kind of email doesn't need MIME decoding anyway.

That depends on what the rules are, but I consider detecting B encodings in the header fields and transliterating it into UTF-8 a good idea (although that sometimes is a lossy conversion depending on the original charset).

Remember this one that prompted me to do the header folding?

    From: YOSHIFUJI Hideaki / =?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCNUhGIzFRTEAbKEI=?= 
            <yoshfuji@linux-ipv6.org>

>  - the others

Show 8 quoted lines

>    ..., trying to handle it 
>    automatically is WRONG WRONG WRONG.
>    And if it's mime-encoded you often have trouble editing it anyway.
>
> Ergo: if somebody sends you mime-encoded patches, hit them with a baseball 
> bat (politely) and teach them not to do that. "Fixing" the tools really 
> will just make things worse if it means that you apply raw emails without 
> having edited them.

I agree with you in principle and that is why I always run applymbox with the -q flag. Maybe I should start trying the baseball bat approach to see what happens.