Re: [PATCH] git-send-email: provide hook to send lines more than 998 symbols

From: Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi>
Date: Nov 21, 2008, 10:52 UTC
Message-ID: <87wsex4aha.fsf@iki.fi>
In-Reply-To: <5ec8ebd50811210237kd6f9341q23bc69b6ffcc2a87@mail.gmail.com>

Andy Shevchenko (2008-11-21 12:37 +0200) wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:34 PM, Arafangion <thestar@fussycoder.id.au> wrote:
>>> By default git-send-email does not accept patch which is contain
>>> lines longer than 998 symbols. Sometime it's inconvenient, i.e. you
>>> have a long list in one variable in shell script. So, define
>>> environment variable GIT_SEND_EMAIL_LONGLINE to something to avoid
>>> that restriction.
>>
>> As a curiosity, why is such a check even neccessary?

> I'm not an author of that strange check (possible it's somehow related
> to b8ebe08b9a643f432866eb7150c3b20d59b755f2)

The author (so to say) of that strange check is RFC 2822 - Internet Message Format.

    2.1.1. Line Length Limits

        There are two limits that this standard places on the number of
        characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more
        than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters,
        excluding the CRLF.

        The 998 character limit is due to limitations in many
        implementations which send, receive, or store Internet Message
        Format messages that simply cannot handle more than 998
        characters on a line. [...]

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html

Perhaps longer lines will work in many cases but atleast warning should be printed to user, or something.