Gmail and unwanted line-wrapping

From: Aaron Crane <git@aaroncrane.co.uk>
Date: Feb 6, 2010, 20:29 UTC
Message-ID: <bc341e101002061229t7a1525c2w2d5a8e221124b3c2@mail.gmail.com>

Documentation/SubmittingPatches says this about dealing with Gmail's propensity for breaking your email:

Show 9 quoted lines

> GMail does not appear to have any way to turn off line wrapping in the web
> interface, so this will mangle any emails that you send.  You can however
> use any IMAP email client to connect to the google imap server, and forward
> the emails through that.  Just make sure to disable line wrapping in that
> email client.  Alternatively, use "git send-email" instead.
>
> Submitting properly formatted patches via Gmail is simple now that
> IMAP support is available. First, edit your ~/.gitconfig to specify your
> account settings:

<snip>

Show 10 quoted lines

> Next, ensure that your Gmail settings are correct. In "Settings" the
> "Use Unicode (UTF-8) encoding for outgoing messages" should be checked.
>
> Once your commits are ready to send to the mailing list, run the following
> command to send the patch emails to your Gmail Drafts folder.
>
>         $ git format-patch -M --stdout origin/master | git imap-send
>
> Go to your Gmail account, open the Drafts folder, find the patch email, fill
> in the To: and CC: fields and send away!

However, the advice beginning "Submitting properly formatted patches via Gmail is simple now" doesn't match my experience. Following those guidelines seemed to work, but my patch was line-wrapped anyway.

It seems I'm not the only person who's observed this: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/133020

Can anyone think of anything I might have done wrong here? If not, I'm inclined to suggest dropping all of that advice. That's not ideal, because it leaves Gmail users with no obvious way to submit well-formatted patches to the list; but it's better than suggesting something which apparently doesn't work.

-- 
Aaron Crane ** http://aaroncrane.co.uk/