Re: [PATCH] format-patch: Properly escape From_ lines when creating an mbox.

On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:48:44 -0700, "H. Peter Anvin" [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Perhaps perfect is an enemy of good?

For production perhaps we should do the MIME-escape thing?

For consumption, it's not so clear...

I suggest as a first step accepting the following:

	format-patch: Emit bare email rather than mbox for single messages.
	<id:1276040615-26008-1-git-send-email-cworth@cworth.org>

That patch should be entirely uncontroversial since it doesn't introduce
any new escaping, neither on the production nor on the consumption side.

It has the tremendous benefit of removing the mbox format entirely from
the "git send-email" workflow, (which will just use bare messages
instead).

With that patch in place, the only place that git will still generate
mbox files is "format-patch --stdout". And the most common use of that
is within git-rebase. For git-rebase, it doesn't matter what kind of
mbox is used as long as it's consistent, since it's practically
guaranteed that git-rebase will be using consistent versions of both
"git format-patch" and "git am".

At that point, I think discussion of confusion from new format-patch and
old am becomes almost meaningless as such interaction will most likely
be happening through bare messages rather than mbox files. When an mbox
file *is* involved I think it will be even more likely to happen through
some external program, (such as an MUA collecting a thread of
git-send-email messages and presenting them to "git am" as an mbox).

-Carl

-- 
carl.d.worth@intel.com