Re: [PATCH] Added --export option to git-send-email.

On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:42:35 -0400
"Avery Pennarun" [off-list ref] wrote:

On 7/13/08, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

 If this additional option claims to produce a mbox, I think:

  (1) quoting only /^From / (not /^>*From/) to be consistent with
the standard practice is the right thing to do; and

  (2) reading side might need to also pay attention to /^>From /,
in case somebody feeds an output from this option back to
send-email.

 However, strictly speaking,(2) may break the standard workflow of
 generating patches with format-patch and feeding the result to
send-email, as format-patch does not do /^From / munging (and it
shouldn't).

Note that it's generally very bad practice to do (2) unless you always
quote /^>*From/.  Quoting only /^From/ and *then* trying to dequote it
correctly actually increases the number of places where you can
corrupt a message.  As a sign that very few programs do (2), I think
it's pretty clear that a lot more people see "From" rewritten as
">From" in their mail app of choice than the reverse.

Junio is right when he says we should match against "From " instead of
"From" (i.e. we should not touch lines beginning with "Fromage" for
example). Should I resubmit or can it be corrected during the merge?
 

There is also some debate about what "standard practice" means.  See:
http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html
.

When I started working on this, I visited Wikipedia which provided a
link to qmail's site, which looks quite authoritative on this matter:
http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/mbox.html

I just followed that spec.

If git is going to start actually producing mbox files (as opposed to
just individual messages as it does now), it should probably
explicitly take a stance on the issue... or perhaps make it
configurable.

Have fun,

Avery