Media type for output of POSIX "diff" utility

[Julian Reschke]

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Julian Reschke wrote:
>> - Would the specification at 
>> <http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/utilities/diff.html> be 
>> sufficient as specification of the contents of the file?
> 
> That depends on what kind of type you have in mind. I do not think it
> would be sufficient for a standards tree text/* type (for reasons of
> internationalization, for example), but for an application/vnd* type
> it might suffice.

Well, I18N would be part of the media type registration (as far as I 
know, diff files do not carry character set information, so the only way 
to specify it would be through the charset parameter).

>> - Would it make sense to define individual types for the different diff 
>> output formats (simple, context, ...), or would that be something for a 
>> type parameter?
> 
> I don't think it's reasonable to expect people would mark the type
> in MIME or HTTP headers; indeed, it might be more valuable to have
> a diff or patch file type that's used for all the different formats.
> Personally I try to avoid using poor diff formats such as this one,
> and would use, say, unified diffs instead.

Funny enough, diff -u is not part of the OpenGroup's spec, so we would 
need to refer to something else (such as: 
<http://www.gnu.org/software/diffutils/manual/html_node/Detailed-Unified.html#Detailed%20Unified>?).

Best regards, Julian