Re: [PATCH] Allow hand-editing of patches before sending

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Nov 5, 2006, 16:44 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0611050831250.25218@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <20061105114353.GB19707@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Karl Hasselström wrote:

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> 
> So the right thing to do would be to teach StGIT to generate
> 8bit-encoded output, and trust the SMTP transfer path do mangle it
> correctly? (Hmm. No, since StGIT talks directly with the first SMTP
> server in the chain, it needs to be able to QP-encode the mail itself
> if necessary -- but it should seldom be necessary, then.)

Right. You could even just consider it an error if the mailserver doesn't reply to EHLO with 8BITMIME, I really think it's that rare.

> In that case, the problem with the current implementation (without my
> patch applied) is likely to be that it fails to provide the headers
> needed for the SMTP path to be able to transform it losslessly.

I _think_ it should be sufficient to just set the Content-Type and Content-Transfer-Encoding to say something like "text/plain; charset=UTF8" and "8bit" respectively. But somebody who know the SMTP rules better should check.

HOWEVER:

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>   Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand
>           id S1750700AbWJVMCV (ORCPT <rfc822;kha-list-git@hemma.treskal.com>);
>           Sun, 22 Oct 2006 08:02:21 -0400
>   X-Warning: Original message contained 8-bit characters, however during
>              the SMTP transport session the receiving system did not announce
>              capability of receiving 8-bit SMTP (RFC 1651-1653), and as this
>              message does not have MIME headers (RFC 2045-2049) to enable
>              encoding change, we had very little choice.

This does seem to say that somebody didn't even announce 8-bit capability in the first place. That's a zmailer error message, and it does imply that somebody was running a bad server.

That said, _if_ your message had had the proper mime-type specifiers, then zmailer would happily have QP-converted the message for you, so everything would have been fine.

> The mail server (vger talking to itself, if the Received: headers were
> added in order) complained that there were no MIME headers, so it had
> to guess the charset.

vger itself? Strange.

		Linus