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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: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday November 05 2018, @12:38AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Monday November 05 2018, @12:38AM (#757794) Homepage
    there's no "diff" or "patch" format, there are several. Do we just standardise on the particular choices git made? Why should ed scripts be left out?
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:15AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:15AM (#758371) Homepage

    ed scripts are abhorrent and a security vulnerability. diff -u a/b is the de facto standard used by everyone. Git didn't make it the standard, Git used it because it was the standard.

    http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/05/bangpatch/ [rachelbythebay.com]

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