Re: [PATCH] send-email: ask about and declare 8bit mails

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 12, 2010, 16:28 UTC
Message-ID: <7vljakfc64.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <cebe57bb68b5e8ea445e560bbe6305c915ce8a1c.1276354971.git.trast@student.ethz.ch>

Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

> git-send-email passes on an 8bit mail as-is even if it does not
> declare a content-type.  Because the user can edit email between
> format-patch and send-email, such invalid mails are unfortunately not
> very hard to come by.
>
> Make git-send-email stop and ask about the encoding to use if it
> encounters any such mail.  Also provide a configuration setting to
> permanently configure an encoding.
>
> Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
> ---
>
> This takes care of what I ran into earlier today.  However, there's
> another problem: format-patch doesn't even mark the patch 8bit if its
> patch contents (not log message) are non-ASCII.  I'm really not sure
> what to do there.

A project won't have uniform file encoding anyway, so even if we were to do something clever about this, it has to be per-patch. Perhaps

 (0) use the attributes mechanism to allow projects to mark paths with
     encoding.  E.g.

	# everything in UTF-8 unless otherwise specified...
        * encoding=UTF-8
        Documentation/zh_CN/* encoding=big5

 (1) for each patch, find the paths involved, and if their encodings are
     the same, perhaps promote that as the encoding used for the entire
     message;

 (2) otherwise, if there is an 8-bit encoding involved in the paths,
     perhaps mark the entire message as 8-bit (binary???).

I have this suspicion that (2) is very rare (you cannot transmit such a patch as a plain text message reliably afaict, so it is not done in practice), and we would probably need to make a separate patchfile for groups of paths in each encoding and attach them as MIME multiparts (ugh).

Just thinkning aloud, before morning caffeine sinks in, so please take this with a grain of salt...