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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?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday November 04 2018, @10:36PM (1 child)
Sorry if i made it sound like i was a "somebody" in this article. I'm not involved. This is just my opinion. Petter Reinholdtsen could of course pursue adding a registered MIME type for diff. It would be great to get everyone on the same page. I just think that there is really no issue here that someone should spend time correcting.
That will be true for every single web browser, FTP client, email client, and "web based" file transfer tool. Not a quick thing! Though most software developers use 3rd-party libraries that perform the file extension lookup for them. Basically a dictionary of extensions and mime types. The fallback is usually application/octet-stream for situations where the extension is unknown or missing. The file will still transfer just fine : )
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04 2018, @11:25PM
The same is true for all MIME types.
You don't like the idea. We get it. But the author of the article recommending this new MIME type analyzed 216k emails that he received (email is something you say this is only good for) and this would be in the top 10 of all attachment types. Clearly there is a use case outside of your personal needs and/or experiences.
Go ahead and ask yourself "are there any other common standards, protocols, document types, processes, tools or software that I don't use that others do?" If the answer is yes, should those never have been established or developed?
There are plenty of workarounds or compromises that can be made regarding technology. Why bother with making anything new if doing it the old way will be "just fine"?