Media type for output of POSIX "diff" utility

[Lisa Dusseault]

On May 31, 2007, at 9:18 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:

>
> The reason why I am looking into this is that it would be great to  
> revive HTTP PATCH, for which in turn it would be good to have a  
> registered MIME type for "patch" payloads. In that case, the patch  
> itself would always apply to a single resource (at the Request- 
> URI). But that's of course only one use case...

It would be great to revive HTTP PATCH.  Another thing I was looking  
into for that was officially registering application/gdiff  (http:// 
w3.org/TR/NOTE-gdiff-19970901) but I'd guess that's not as widely  
used as "diff" and "diff -e".

The patent situation around application/gdiff's format is uncertain  
and I never got a response from the spec authors around that.  That  
was the major stumbling block since there's a field in the  
registration form for that.  Perhaps the next step would be to see if  
we can *document* the unclear patent situation (a simple mention)  
rather than try to resolve it.

Lisa