Media type for output of POSIX "diff" utility

[Simon Josefsson]

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, 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.

/Simon