Media type for output of POSIX "diff" utility

[Martin Duerst]

At 01:17 07/06/01, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi at gmx.net> writes:
>
>>>What exactly does that mean? That different parts of it have a different 
>>>character encoding?
>>
>> Yes, that's not uncommon with this kind of format. Think "I converted
>> the README from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8, see the attached patch".
>
>Even though I haven't seen that example in practice, POSIX says the
>'input files may be of any type' and thus I can't see any reason why the
>above shouldn't work.
>
>This argues for application/patch, which would be unfortunate since most
>patches are readable as text.
>
>Would it be possible to register text/patch AND application/patch,

I guess that would be possible.

>and
>specify that if a particular patch contains text whose charset is
>non-ASCII or not known, application/patch MUST be used, but otherwise
>text/plain SHOULD be used?  That would not destroy data and also lead to
>a readable output.

The exact conditions should be different, namely text/patch for
cases where the 'charset' is known and is the same for both/all
involved files (at least as far as it can be observed in the
patch itself), and application/patch for everything else, i.e.
in particular unknown 'charset' and cases with multiple charsets.

Regards,   Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp