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

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: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @07:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @07:12AM (#757881)

    MIME is an incompatible mess designed by committee. At the time, the situation was:

    1. Apple filesystems had weird type and creator codes that nobody else supported.
    2. Everybody else used file extensions.

    Apple wouldn't sign off on file extensions, so instead we get something new. Trouble is, file extensions wouldn't go away. Apple even caved; it is now normal to use file extensions on MacOS X.

    We have a crazy situation now. It works like this:

    1. There is just a file extension. Only that can be used.
    2. We want to send the file via email or web, which requires a MIME type, so we generate one from the file extension.
    3. The recipient is required to use the MIME type instead of the file extension.
    4. The recipient saves the file into the filesystem, forgetting the MIME type.
    5. There is just a file extension. Only that can be used.

    What ever was the point?

    This causes trouble. Files effectively change type as they are saved. This may cause the software to display them differently.

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