From: Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2018 07:07:51 +0000 (+0100)
Subject: New post.
X-Git-Url: https://pere.pagekite.me/gitweb/homepage.git/commitdiff_plain/0a20fe3a9855e82ea0888e4f50c3c4d35e1d0e5d

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