Re: [media-types] Mime type for patch files?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <[e-mail]>]

[Eric Prud'hommeaux]
> I think this negotiation must happen with the tool maintainers which
> currently recognize text/x-{patch,diff}. Given that that's probably
> impossible, the answer is almost certainly that you are stuck with
> "x-". Thanks for picking this up.

I have no idea how to identify the tool maintainers which currently
recognize text/x-{patch,diff}.  Perhaps at least the maintainers of
http://www.gnu.org/software/diffutils/ and
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/patch/ are relevant contributors to
such discussion?  They do not really use or recognice MIME types, being
command line tools, but are responsible for the typical producer and
consumer of these files.

On Debian systems, text/x-patch and text/x-diff are set to be aliases
for each other, with text/x-patch being the primary one, according to
the /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml file provided by the
shared-mime-info package.  I guess this provide one data point for
preferring text/x-patch over text/x-diff as the official MIME type.

Personally I would prefer to move to text/patch for the official MIME
type as diff produces a patch in text format, which I believe text/patch
expresses better than any of the alternatives.

I notice you mention application/*.  Is not text/* a better choice,
given that for example patches in emails could be shown directly in the
email and do not need a "viewer" to be readable to those of us receiving
patches?

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen