Re: [RFC 0/1] mailinfo: de-quote quoted-pair in header fields

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 14, 2016, 19:30 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqfup2qny9.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160914191759.5unwaq2eequ4pifr@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

> On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 10:43:18AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> I think we can go either way and it does not matter all that much if
>> "mailinfo" changes its output or the reader of "mailinfo" output
>> changes its input--we will either be munging data read from "From:"
>> when producing the "Author:" line, or taking the "Author:" output by
>> mailinfo and removing the quotes.
>
> Yeah, that was the part I was wondering about in my original response.
> What is the output of mailinfo _supposed_ to be, and do we consider that
> at all public (i.e., are there are other tools besides "git am" that
> build on mailinfo)?
>
> At least "am" already does some quote-stripping, so any de-quoting added
> in mailinfo is potentially a regression (if we indeed care about keeping
> the output stable).

Another small thing I am not sure about is if the \ quoting can hide an embedded newline in the author name. Would we end up turning

	From: "Jeff \
            King" <peff@peff.net>

or somesuch into

	Author: Jeff
        King
        Email: peff@peff.net

;-)

> But if we are OK with that, it seems to me that mailinfo is the best
> place to do the de-quoting, because then its output is well-defined:
> everything after "Author:" up to the newline is the name.

There are other things mailinfo does, like turning this

	From: peff@peff.net (Jeff King)

into

	Author: Jeff King
        Email: peff@peff.net

and

	From: Uh "foo" Bar peff@peff.net (Jeff King)

into

	Author: Uh "foo" Bar (Jeff King)
        Email: peff@peff.net

So let's roll the \" -> " into mailinfo.

I am not sure if we also should remove the surrounding "", i.e. we currently do not turn this

	From: "Jeff King" <peff@peff.net>

into this:

	Author: Jeff King
        Email: peff@peff.net

I think we probably should, and remove the one that does so from the reader.