Sending UTF-8 patches (was: [PATCH 2/2] Remove now-defunct ts7250 nand driver)

[Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> It looks like your patch has legacy garbage in it:
> 
> > - *   Copyright (C) 2004 Marius Gr<F6>ger (mag@sysgo.de)
> 
> It fails to apply because the ö (correctly represented as 0xc3 0xb6) has
> been converted into a single byte 0xf6 in some legacy character set.
>
> When applying patches, git-am does look at the Content-Type: header and
> convert legacy crap into UTF-8 for the changelog, but it leaves the
> patch itself alone.

That's unfortunate.  An option to git-am or it's subsidiary tools to
convert the patch as well as the commit would be useful.  After all it
_is_ made clear in the MIME header how it's formatted.

> Care to join us in the 21st century?

You mean send the mail in UTF-8 format when it only contains
characters in ISO-8859-1?  To make that the default behaviour of an
email sender would possibly violate RFC2045, which as far as I can
tell is still the prevailing standard, which is I guess why Mutt does
not do that in its default configuration, and recodes the text from
UTF-8 to 8859-1 when it can.  That's what 21st century tools do :-)

I guess it's time for a "send-hook" to use a different setting
specially for Linux mailing lists.

Do you instead mean send the patch in UTF-8 embedded in a mail encoded
as 8859-1?  That sounds quite difficult, if the patch is inline rather
than attached.

An option to git-am to DTRT sounds infinitely better to me.  Shame
it's not there; unfortunately it doesn't emit enough information to
make it easy with a wrapper script.

What settings do you use to get this right?

Thanks,
-- Jamie