Re: [PATCH] send-email: ask about and declare 8bit mails

Thomas Rast [off-list ref] writes:

git-send-email passes on an 8bit mail as-is even if it does not
declare a content-type.  Because the user can edit email between
format-patch and send-email, such invalid mails are unfortunately not
very hard to come by.

Make git-send-email stop and ask about the encoding to use if it
encounters any such mail.  Also provide a configuration setting to
permanently configure an encoding.

Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <redacted>
---

This takes care of what I ran into earlier today.  However, there's
another problem: format-patch doesn't even mark the patch 8bit if its
patch contents (not log message) are non-ASCII.  I'm really not sure
what to do there.

A project won't have uniform file encoding anyway, so even if we were to
do something clever about this, it has to be per-patch.  Perhaps

 (0) use the attributes mechanism to allow projects to mark paths with
     encoding.  E.g.

	# everything in UTF-8 unless otherwise specified...
        * encoding=UTF-8
        Documentation/zh_CN/* encoding=big5

 (1) for each patch, find the paths involved, and if their encodings are
     the same, perhaps promote that as the encoding used for the entire
     message;

 (2) otherwise, if there is an 8-bit encoding involved in the paths,
     perhaps mark the entire message as 8-bit (binary???).

I have this suspicion that (2) is very rare (you cannot transmit such a
patch as a plain text message reliably afaict, so it is not done in
practice), and we would probably need to make a separate patchfile for
groups of paths in each encoding and attach them as MIME multiparts (ugh).

Just thinkning aloud, before morning caffeine sinks in, so please take
this with a grain of salt...