Re: Patching packages (WAS Re: Who is maintainer of pcl-cvs)
Jarl Friis wrote:
> > What is "quoted printable encoding"?
>
> It's a mechanism for ensuring that the data isn't modified during
> transit. Certain characters are encoded as "=XX", where XX is the
> character's hex value. Also any newlines which are introduced to break
> lines to the 80-character limit are preceded with an "=".
>
> Basically, it's saying "use quoted-printable encoding rather than
> base-64 encoding or no encoding". Base-64 is completely illegible
> unless decoded; no encoding risks data corruption in transit.
In that case, how do I ensure that I attach it as "quoted printable
encoding"? i.e. what MIME-type major/minor is that?
It isn't a type, it's a "transfer encoding". A typical patch
attachment would have something like:
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
AFAIK, VM will use the setting of vm-mime-8bit-text-transfer-encoding
to determine the encoding of text/plain attachments. The default is
quoted-printable.
As far as I know MIME attachments (any type) are never modified
during transit.
A lot of mail-handling software doesn't understand MIME; it just
treats the entire message as "text".
Long lines may be truncated, line terminator characters (CR, LF, CRLF)
may be converted, tabs may be converted to spaces, characters outside
of the range 32-126 may be discarded, mangled, or cause odd behaviour.
Both base-64 and quoted-printable encodings eliminate these problems
by encoding attachments in such a way that they don't contain any
problematic characters or long lines.
--
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements(a)virgin.net>