Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 12 submissions in the queue.

Time for an Official MIME Type for Patches?

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday November 04 2018, @07:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the application/patch dept.

canopic jug writes:

Petter Reinholdtsen at the Skolelinux project has a very, very short blog post which simply asks if it is time for an official MIME type for patches and points to the mailing list proposed for such a discussion.

As part of my involvement in the Nikita archive API project, I've been importing a fairly large lump of emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would go. I picked a subset of my notmuch email database, all public emails sent to me via @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import. In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed that one of the most common attachment formats do not have an official MIME type registered with IANA/IETF. The output from diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats included in these emails. At the moment people seem to use either text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered. It would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used everywhere.

What do Soylentils have to say for or against designating a specific MIME type for software patches? Which details need to be addressed and would there be any pitfalls?

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Time for an Official MIME Type for Patches? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 22 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday November 04 2018, @09:17PM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 04 2018, @09:17PM (#757729) Journal

    This lets your email viewer display the file perfectly fine as text and opening it will use the program locally registered for the file extension.

    But.. without the MIME type, how would Outlook know how to automagically apply the patch for you?

    (grin)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday November 04 2018, @09:58PM (1 child)

    by RamiK (1813) on Sunday November 04 2018, @09:58PM (#757739)

    This is one of the best features of patchwork [github.com]: It picks up patches off the mailing list and builds them automatically with a continuous integration service. Then it replies to the patch message with the results.

    Outlook wise, there add-ins hooking up to git apply and git diff that can be automated to do exactly what you described on a build server that I wouldn't be surprised to find some Windows build server is actually using somewhere.

    (stiff upper lip)

    --
    compiling...

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by tibman on Sunday November 04 2018, @10:37PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 04 2018, @10:37PM (#757758)

      Looks like they use text/plain : D

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.