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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?

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04 2018, @10:31PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04 2018, @10:31PM (#757754)

    Bad actors will be able to patch your machine just by sending you email? That idea is so laughably insecure that I have to wonder if the Petter Reinholdtsen actually works for Micrisoft.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04 2018, @11:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04 2018, @11:29PM (#757777)

    Hmm ... me thinks you don't understand what this is about. Those "bad actors" would have to merge the patch into the existing source on the recipient's system (or maybe even pull the source), compile it and deploy it. If they can do that then I think we all have bigger problems to worry about.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @12:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @12:28AM (#757792)

      > merge the patch into the existing source on the recipient's system (or maybe even pull the source), compile it and deploy it
      >> works for Micrisoft

      I think gp understood fine...