Re: mailing list archiver chewing patches

On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 02:17:27AM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > >
> > > Tim Bunce's recent patch has been mangled apparently by the list
> > > archives. He sent it as an attachment, and that's how I have it in
> > > my mailbox, so why isn't it appearing as such in the web archive so
> > > that it can be nicely downloaded? See <http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/20100108124613.GL2505@timac.local>.
> > > It's happened to other people as well:
> > > <http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/4B02D3E4.1040107@hut.fi>
> > >
> > > Reviewers and others shouldn't have to c&p patches from web pages,
> > > especially when it will be horribly line wrapped etc. Can we stop
> > > this happening somehow?
> >
> > Try this
> >
> > http://archives.postgresql.org/msgtxt(dot)php?id=20100108124613(dot)GL2505(at)timac(dot)local

That looks like it dumps the raw message. That'll cause problems for any
messages using quoted-printable encoding. I'd hazard a guess it also
won't do thing right thing for non-charset=us-ascii emails/attachments.

> This was previously broken for a lot of emails, but I just fixed some of
> it, and it seems to work for the vast majority of our emails (and
> certainly for all emails that matter).
>
> The other point related to this is that each email should have a link
> pointing to its text/plain version. This used to be present, but it got
> broken (I think) at the same time that the anti-email-harvesting measure
> got broken. I'm going to look at that next.
>
> Let me know if you find something broken with this style of link.

What's needed is a) a download link for each attachment, regardless of the
kind of attachment, and b) the download link should download the content
of the attachment in a way that's directly usable.

For example, see http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-01/msg00589.php
Looking at the raw version of the original message
http://archives.postgresql.org/msgtxt(dot)php?id=757953(dot)70187(dot)qm(at)web29001(dot)mail(dot)ird(dot)yahoo(dot)com
That message has a patch as an attachment:
Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="patch_bit.patch"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="patch_bit.patch"

It gets a link in the archive (because it's a non-text content-type I presume):
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-01/bin5ThVOJC3jI.bin
but the link doesn't work well. The url ends with .bin and the http
response content-type is Content-Type: application/octet-stream so
downloaders get a .bin file instead of the original .patch file.

It seems that people wanting to send in a patch have two options: send
it as text/(something) so it's readable on the archive web page but not
copy-n-paste'able because of wordwrapping, or set it as
application/octet-stream so it's downloadable but not readable on the
web page.

Let me know if I've misunderstood anything.

Some sugestions:
- Provide links for all attachments, whether text/* or not.
- For text/* types show the content inline verbatim, don't wrap the text.
- If the attachment has a Content-Disposition with a filename then
append that to the url. It could simply be a fake 'path info':
.../2010-01/bin5ThVOJC3jI.bin/patch_bit.patch
- Instead of "Description: Binary data" on the web page, give the
values of the Content-Type and Content-Disposition headers.

Tim.

p.s. For background... I'm writing an email to the dbi-users &
dbi-announce mailing lists (~2000 & ~5000 users last time I checked)
asking anyone who might be interested to help review the plperl feature
patch and encouraging them to contribute to the commitfest review
process for other patches. It's important that it's *very* easy for
these new-comers to follow simple instructions to get involved.
I was hoping to be able to use a archives.postgresql.org url to the
message with the patch to explain what's the patch does _and_ provide a
download link. It seems I'll have to upload the patch somewhere else.