requiring text format for patch attachments?

[Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf at tilera dot com>]

On 6/28/2013 6:39 AM, Marcus Shawcroft wrote:
> This patch fixes the AArch64 implementation of elf_machine_dynamic() to find
> _DYNAMIC via _GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_ as discussed here:

I'm all for using attachments for patches, to preserve whitespace, etc., but I wonder whether it might make sense to require attachments for libc-alpha or libc-ports to be text/plain or text/x-patch rather than application/octet-stream or other non-text types (as Marcus did in the quoted email)?  Otherwise the patch doesn't get generally displayed inline by the MUA, and one has to separately run some external tool to view it.  Perhaps a mailing list filtering step that bounces emails with non-text attachments, with a helpful explanation?

It does seem like with the rise of GUI MUAs it has become harder to reliably paste patches into emails.  I end up writing emails that include patches in a text editor and then running "sendmail -f < myemail", which frankly, isn't a great user experience. :-)   To be fair, I just checked Thunderbird, and my configuration does seem to use "text/" types for diff attachments, so perhaps I'll switch to using that going forward.  I did double-check the wiki contribution checklist to confirm it says "patches inline or as attachments", so from that point of view we seem to be OK.

-- 
Chris Metcalf, Tilera Corp.
http://www.tilera.com