Re: [PATCH 01/10] Add a birdview-on-the-source-code section to the user manual

On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 12:50:44AM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

But the mail I got through the git list yesterday has some odd stuff in
it:

From git-owner@vger.kernel.org Mon May 14 11:22:01 2007
Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.176.167])
	by fieldses.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67)
	(envelope-from [off-list ref])
	id 1HncN6-00051C-Mh
	for bfields@fieldses.org; Mon, 14 May 2007 11:22:01 -0400
Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand
	id S1755729AbXENPVe (ORCPT <rfc822;bfields@fieldses.org>);
	Mon, 14 May 2007 11:21:34 -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.
X-Warning: We ASSUME it is less harmful to add the MIME headers, and
	   convert the text to Quoted-Printable, than not to do so,
	   and to strip the message to 7-bits.. (RFC 1428 Appendix A)
X-Warning: We don't know what character set the user used, thus we had to
	   write these MIME-headers with our local system default value.
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1

Interesting. vger is correct in translating, since your mail server does
_not_ advertise the 8BITMIME extension (even though exim is 8-bit clean,
and could handle it).

However, the content-type is already specified, so it shouldn't need to
rewrite. However, I notice that your original message is missing a
MIME-Version: 1.0 header. My guess is that vger's logic is that without
that header, it can't trust the Content-Type you have provided (and
indeed, not including MIME-Version violates the MIME RFCs, I believe).

I assumed this was a bug in git-send-email, but looking closer, it
doesn't put in any mime information at all! So your sending smtp server
is adding in the content-type header, but it's failing to add the
MIME-Version header, which I think is a bug (I can dig up the RFC
reference if you want).

Arguably, git should be generating the full MIME header-set, since it
knows what actual encoding the message is in.

-Peff