Re: use base64 instead of quoted-printable in format-patch headers (was Re: Make format-patch produce UTF-8 `From:' header)
- From
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
- Date
- Sep 20, 2010, 13:46 UTC
- Message-ID
- <AANLkTim-vfrxGbdfXeef81uP29NSSzutHbs-yhhQtiA8@mail.gmail.com>
- In-Reply-To
- <87k4mgsj1j.fsf_-_@gmail.com>
On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 12:20, Štěpán Němec <stepnem@gmail.com> wrote:
Show 34 quoted lines
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes: > >> Štěpán Němec <stepnem@gmail.com> writes: >>> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes: >> >>>> Maybe format-patch could provide another mode to produce patches that >>>> do not include unnecessary headers (in particular, leaving out the >>>> difficult "From " line and using UTF-8 instead of quoted-printable for >>>> the "From: " line). >> >>> FWIW, the quoted-printable `From:' encoding has always annoyed me -- I >>> replace it manually with my name & address in UTF-8 every time I send >>> out a patch. What is the reason format-patch does that (and if there is >>> a reason not to change the default, could an option to disable it be >>> provided)? >> >> Well, it's required if you're going to actually send the result directly >> as a mail message, since the RFC 5322 format requires headers be encoded >> using RFC 2047 encoding. > > Right... thanks for pointing that out. So the problem I'm seeing is > actually different -- some software (including Mutt and the mailing > list/archive software used by this list) appears to have problems with > quoted-printable, but not with base64. > > To take my name as example: when I send mail from Mutt, it is encoded as > "=?utf-8?B?xaB0xJtww6FuIE7Em21lYw==?=", i.e. base64, and both Mutt and > the vger archive seem to decode it properly, whereas the > quoted-printable version produced by fromat-patch, i.e. > "=?utf-8?q?=C5=A0t=C4=9Bp=C3=A1n=20N=C4=9Bmec?=" in this case, is left > undecoded by Mutt and mis-decoded in the ML archive as far as I have > seen. I'm not sure about other software (Gnus seems to be able to deal > with both correctly), but perhaps it would make sense to switch to > base64 in format-patch?
The advantage of quoted-printable is the printable part. It's at least somewhat human readable, e.g.:
=?UTF-8?q?=C3=86var=20Arnfj=C3=B6r=C3=B0=20Bjarmason?=
I have some chance of spotting a typo or something in there if I look at the raw E-Mail (which I often do), but not with base64.
Are we sure we're correctly encoding quoted-printable? E.g. maybe ?UTF-8? instead of ?utf-8? would work? It seems odd that a widely used client like Mutt would screw up such a widely used encoding.