Re: "add -p" + filenames with UTF-8 multibyte characters = "No changes"

From: Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi>
Date: Feb 16, 2009, 05:13 UTC
Message-ID: <87ljs7ynf0.fsf@iki.fi>
In-Reply-To: <20090216033634.GA12461@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On 2009-02-15 22:36 (-0500), Jeff King wrote:

> I am not opposed to setting this as a default, but I think there may
> be some encoding issues to be dealt with. At the very least,
> format-patch generates messages without a content-type header. E.g.,:

> But what is the right encoding to specify? We can guess that it is
> whatever the commit message is in (defaulting to utf-8). It is by no
> means correct, but it would probably work pretty well in practice.

I have a small script which adds/rewrites MIME headers. It defaults to UTF-8/8bit:

    #!/bin/sh

    charset="${1:-UTF-8}"
    encoding="${2:-8bit}"

    formail -I "MIME-Version: 1.0" \
            -I "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=$charset" \
            -I "Content-Transfer-Encoding: $encoding" \
            -s

I have used the script this way:

    git format-patch --stdout [...] | add-mime-headers | \
        formail -s sh -c 'cat >$FILENO.patch'

It may be difficult and unreliable to try to detect the encoding of file content so maybe "git format-patch" could be taught an option like "--charset=<charset>". (And perhaps also a configuration variable.) That would just write MIME headers (charset) as the user wishes.