Binary files in format-patch

["Caio Marcelo" <cmarcelo@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I'm using "git format-patch" to generate messages for a code review
mailing list. It work fine except when we have binary files involved.
Their contents are not relevant for us, and doesn't help much in a
mailing list. Taking a peek at the code I've found out this:

In commit e47f306d4bf964def1a0b29e8f7cea419471dffd (short name: "git
format-patch: make --binary on by default"), we add a new restriction
on the possible options to format-patch: if you don't specify --text,
it enables --binary. But looking at today's code, we have a path that
is never taken for format-patch, in function builtin_diff (diff.c), at
lines 1423 to 1433. The fprintf doesn't ever happen, because if it's
TEXT, it dumps the contents verbatim, if it's BINARY, it encodes (to
some baseXX) the files/diff.

Wouldn't be nice to allow this code path to happen via some
--omit-binary / --no-binary option to be checked in cmd_format_patch?
(I could provide a patch for this, if you think it's a good idea).

Or should I try to solve my problem by other means (post-processing
the patches, building my own with git-diff)?


Cheers,
  Caio Marcelo