Re: use base64 instead of quoted-printable in format-patch headers (was Re: Make format-patch produce UTF-8 `From:' header)

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 12:20, Štěpán Němec <stepnem@gmail.com> wrote:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>
>> Štěpán Němec <stepnem@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>>> Maybe format-patch could provide another mode to produce patches that
>>>> do not include unnecessary headers (in particular, leaving out the
>>>> difficult "From " line and using UTF-8 instead of quoted-printable for
>>>> the "From: " line).
>>
>>> FWIW, the quoted-printable `From:' encoding has always annoyed me -- I
>>> replace it manually with my name & address in UTF-8 every time I send
>>> out a patch. What is the reason format-patch does that (and if there is
>>> a reason not to change the default, could an option to disable it be
>>> provided)?
>>
>> Well, it's required if you're going to actually send the result directly
>> as a mail message, since the RFC 5322 format requires headers be encoded
>> using RFC 2047 encoding.
>
> Right... thanks for pointing that out. So the problem I'm seeing is
> actually different -- some software (including Mutt and the mailing
> list/archive software used by this list) appears to have problems with
> quoted-printable, but not with base64.
>
> To take my name as example: when I send mail from Mutt, it is encoded as
> "=?utf-8?B?xaB0xJtww6FuIE7Em21lYw==?=", i.e. base64, and both Mutt and
> the vger archive seem to decode it properly, whereas the
> quoted-printable version produced by fromat-patch, i.e.
> "=?utf-8?q?=C5=A0t=C4=9Bp=C3=A1n=20N=C4=9Bmec?=" in this case, is left
> undecoded by Mutt and mis-decoded in the ML archive as far as I have
> seen. I'm not sure about other software (Gnus seems to be able to deal
> with both correctly), but perhaps it would make sense to switch to
> base64 in format-patch?

The advantage of quoted-printable is the printable part. It's at least
somewhat human readable, e.g.:

    =?UTF-8?q?=C3=86var=20Arnfj=C3=B6r=C3=B0=20Bjarmason?=

I have some chance of spotting a typo or something in there if I look
at the raw E-Mail (which I often do), but not with base64.

Are we sure we're correctly encoding quoted-printable? E.g. maybe
?UTF-8? instead of ?utf-8? would work? It seems odd that a widely used
client like Mutt would screw up such a widely used encoding.