Re: [PATCH] Documentation: networking: device drivers: Remove stray asterisks

>
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
>
> > On Sat, Nov 30, 2019 at 10:35 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> OK, so it appears that the tool is working as documented.
> >
> > Well, yes and no.
> >
> > I think it's a mistake that --no-keep-cr (which is the default) only
> > acts on the outer envelope.
> >
> > Now, *originally* the outer envelope was all that existed so it makes
> > sense in a historical context of "CR removal happens when splitting
> > emails in an mbox". And that's the behavior we have.
>
> Hmph, first of all, the one I was referring to as "documented" was
> about --ignore-whitespace, and not --no-keep-cr.
>
> And I am not as sure as you seem to be about "--no-keep-cr" either.
>
> What was the reason why "--no-keep-cr" was invented and made
> default?  Wasn't it because RFC says that each line of plaintext
> transfer of an e-mail is terminated with CRLF?  It would mean that,
> whether the payload originally had CRLF terminated or LF terminated,
> we would not be able to tell---the CR may have been there from the
> beginning, or it could have been added in transit.  And because we
> (the projects Git was originally designed to serve well) wanted our
> patches with LF terminated lines most of the time, it made sense to
> strip CR from CRLF (i.e. assuming that it would be rare that the
> sender wants to transmit CRLF terminated lines).
>
> If the contents were base64 protected from getting munged during
> transit, we _know_ CRLF in the payload after we decode MIME is what
> the sender _meant_ to give us, no?  Which leads me to say ...
>
> >
> > But then git learnt to do MIME decoding and extracting things from
> > base64 etc, and the CR removal wasn't updated to that change.
>
> ... I do not think it was a wrong decision (well, I do not think we
> made the conscious decision to do so, though) not to do that update.
>
> I dunno.
>