Re: git am and CRLF files

[Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@googlemail.com>]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Nanako Shiraishi <nanako3@lavabit.com> wrote:
> Quoting Stefan Naewe <stefan.naewe@atlas-elektronik.com>
>
>>> A repository with some UNIX (LF) and some Windows (CRLF) files.
>>> (and no: I will not change the files. My editors handle CRLF and LF correctly)
>>>
>>> My problem:
>>>
>>> 'git am' can't handle changes in CRLF files because the patch
>>> gets converted (by git mailsplit) to contain only LF.
>>
>>> Stefan
>>
>> Does anyone have any comment on this ?
>
> This was done very much on purpose.
>
> The "am" command is meant to handle e-mailed patches, and traditionally
> mails are known to clobber carriage returns.
>

According to RFC 5322, email messages use CRLF as the
newline-sequence. In order to be able to distinguish between CRLF and
LF in an e-mail patch, the message needs to be use some
transfer-encoding that preserves newline style (like base64).

Perhaps this would be better fixed by having format-patch (or prehaps
the MUA ?) base64-encode the message body if the file contains
non-LF-newlines, and normalizing CRLF to LF before transport-decoding?
Or does some MUAs transport-decode before storing the message to disk?

I realize this might make it a bit tricky to review patches that
contains CRLF-newlines before mailing them out, but perhaps inspecting
the format-patch output is the wrong place to do this?

-- 
Erik "kusma" Faye-Lund