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From: Jon Moore <jonm@jjmoore.net>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 09:24:15 -0400
To: Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
Cc: "ietf-types@ietf.org" <ietf-types@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [ietf-types] Status of application/patch or text/patch?
Precedence: list

I think application/{diff,patch} and text/{diff,patch} both have their place=
s. The application/* version will be easier to specify, for sure. However, a=
 very, very common use case for diff is exchanging source code diffs against=
 ASCII-encoded files; being able to have a text/* version means, for example=
, that many clients will be able to treat them as generic text files--for ex=
ample, a browser could just display the diff rather than downloading it. So t=
he text/* version might be more generally consumable.=20

There are probably some very simple rules by which a producer could run 'dif=
f' and know that the output could be labelled 'text/diff' without much extra=
 work (for example, if the two documents given as arguments to diff have the=
 same encoding, and it is one of us-ascii, iso-8859-*, or utf-8,then you're g=
ood).=20

My intent would be to document both media types. Does anyone have opinions r=
egarding whether this should be one or two RFCs?

Jon
........
Jon Moore


On Jul 19, 2012, at 8:12 AM, Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> wrote:

> Jon Moore <jonm@jjmoore.net> writes:
>=20
>> Hi folks,
>>=20
>> Given the recent arrival of HTTP PATCH in RFC 5789[1], it seems like
>> registering a media type for the output of the 'diff' utility would be
>> a good idea. I found this thread from 2007 where Julian Reschke
>> proposed this exact thing:
>>=20
>> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-types/current/msg00591.html
>>=20
>> Does anyone know where this landed? I'd like to pick up the torch and
>> at least work on text/diff (using the unified diff format, and limited
>> to those diffs that can be rendered as valid text/* types). I've
>> started putting together an Internet Draft for it, but was wondering
>> if this had actually run into technical trouble, or if it just ran out
>> of steam in 2007.
>=20
> The issue of how to deal with different character encodings were
> unresolved, and I think it is important to get right.  The approach to
> specify an application/patch is the easy way out.  Trying to resolve it
> for a text/patch may be possible, but I fear it will be problematic in
> practice.  Thus I lean towards a application/patch.
>=20
> /Simon