blog/data/2018-11-01-patch-mime-type.txt

   1 Title: Time for an official MIME type for patches?
   2 Tags: english, debian, standard, noark5
   3 Date: 2018-11-01 08:15
   4
   5 <p>As part of my involvement in
   6 <a href="https://gitlab.com/OsloMet-ABI/nikita-noark5-core">the Nikita
   7 archive API project</a>, I've been importing a fairly large lump of
   8 emails into a test instance of the archive to see how well this would
   9 go.  I picked a subset of <a href="https://notmuchmail.org/">my
  10 notmuch email database</a>, all public emails sent to me via
  11 @lists.debian.org, giving me a set of around 216 000 emails to import.
  12 In the process, I had a look at the various attachments included in
  13 these emails, to figure out what to do with attachments, and noticed
  14 that one of the most common attachment formats do not have
  15 <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">an
  16 official MIME type</a> registered with IANA/IETF.  The output from
  17 diff, ie the input for patch, is on the top 10 list of formats
  18 included in these emails.  At the moment people seem to use either
  19 text/x-patch or text/x-diff, but neither is officially registered.  It
  20 would be better if one official MIME type were registered and used
  21 everywhere.</p>
  22
  23 <p>To try to get one official MIME type for these files, I've brought
  24 up the topic on
  25 <a href="https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/media-types">the
  26 media-types mailing list</a>.  If you are interested in discussion
  27 which MIME type to use as the official for patch files, or involved in
  28 making software using a MIME type for patches, perhaps you would like
  29 to join the discussion?</p>
  30
  31 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  32 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  33 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>