Re: [PATCH] git-send-email: provide hook to send lines more than 998 symbols

[Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>]

Arafangion wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 12:37 +0200, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:34 PM, Arafangion <thestar@fussycoder.id.au> wrote:
>>>> By default git-send-email does not accept patch which is contain lines longer
>>>> than 998 symbols. Sometime it's inconvenient, i.e. you have a long list in one
> <snip>
>>> As a curiosity, why is such a check even neccessary?
>> I'm not an author of that strange check (possible it's somehow related
>> to b8ebe08b9a643f432866eb7150c3b20d59b755f2)
> 
> I can't seem to find that changeset, however the reason why I asked is
> because I thought I remembered that some mail clients could crash if
> they got lines longer than that, and we should cater for that even if
> those clients should handle mails better than that!  Apparently it's
> specified in the relevant RFC2822, and this particular solution has
> already been contributed as:
> https://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/1/18/579779
> 

Well, there's quite a lot of arguing following that mail, and it
doesn't seem to end with a final decision.

> I would be inclined to suggest that such patches should be sent as an
> attachment instead?

No, that would be bad. Many communities (git included) discard
patches that aren't sent inline unless that's for a very good reason
(translation patches are almost always inline, as they tend to break
stuff for people who lack the proper encoding).

> While patches should be sent inline to encourage discussion of the
> patch, if the patch has such insanely long lines, the probability that
> the bulk of your audience in having a good email client that doesn't
> mangle your patch may become rather low.
> 

Reviewable source-code doesn't contain lines longer than 100 or so lines
anyway, so we might as well break on some arbitrary (say, 200) width
and ask the user to resubmit with the "--attach" option if they really
want to send their patch.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231