Re: [ietf-types] Status of application/patch or text/patch?

["Martin J. Dürst" <[e-mail]>]

On 2012/07/21 5:49, Jon Moore wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 2:46 PM, Paul Libbrecht<[e-mail]>  wrote:
>> Erm... source charset makes sense to me (this is "the charset of the patch").
>> But target charset makes no sense into a media-type... this is "after applying a patch" which is beyond the scope of a single file.
>
> No, the issue is that the patch file could have mixed charsets. If the
> change is 'convert README from iso-8859-1 to utf-8', then the patch
> file itself will have two character sets:
>
> 1. The lines that begin with '-' or ' ' will be iso-8859-1.
> 2. The lines that begin with '+' will be utf-8.
>
> Since these are incompatible charsets (neither is a superset of the
> other), we need two charset parameters to describe them, and this
> patch is not capable of being a text/* document. I'm open to other
> names besides 'source' and 'target', but I'm not sure how we get
> around having two of them for this case.

Just use application/patch. I don't think current diff programs are able 
to deal with character encoding parameters. I don't think people 
necessarily need to know the source/target encoding in the above 
example, unless something weird happens and they need to debug (in which 
case, they'll find out by themselves through trial and error anyway).

I also don't think there is much of a use case for:
- Originator: Has files in Latin-1, makes a diff in that encoding,
   sends to receiver.
- Receiver: Has files in UTF-8, wants to apply patch and wants a
   conversion from Latin-1 to UTF-8 to happen automatically.

So I very much agree with Björn here.

Regards,   Martin.