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

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2012-07-20 12:38, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> ...
> Some reasons that I had in mind were:
>
> * There is no character set issues -- the encoder doesn't need to know
>    which character encoding was used.  The specification doesn't have to
>    talk about character sets (which makes up a big chunk of the current
>    spec.)
> ...

The encoder needs to be aware of lines, which implies that it knows that 
octet sequence(s) are line endings.

> * It can deal with diff's of files with different character sets,
>    e.g. converting ISO-8859-1 files to UTF-8.  Like the draft says now,
>    the text/* approach is unable to deal with this.

I don't see that the problem is.

 From a media type of view, the patch consists on instructions how to 
patch certain lines in a text file. So to make this work properly, the 
encoding of both the patch and the file-to-be-patched need to be known, 
but they don't need to be the same.

> * Sometimes text/* parts are modified by gateways, and this is usually
>    avoided by using an application/* type.  So the spec doesn't have to
>    talk about these concerns.

If a gateway every changed the charset, it would need to do it properly. 
Otherwise it's broken anyway (and I would be surprised if it handled 
PATCH properly).

> However I support doing both media types.  For some situations,
> text/patch is appropriate.
>
> /Simon

Best regards, Julian