Re: [Quilt-dev] Quilt 0.65 coming soon

[Jean Delvare]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2016 18:56:20 +0900, Yasushi SHOJI wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 4:30 PM, Jean Delvare <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I added this short help text after noticing that the option was not
> > documented at all. But the truth is, I don't use the quilt mail
> > command, and I don't really know what the option does. It was an
> > uneducated guess. You certainly know better. Would you mind providing a
> > patch to describe the option properly? I'd be happy to apply it before
> > releasing v0.65.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't use it neither. My comment was from 15 min. reading
> and grepping of quilt source code and document with "charset" right before
> writing translation.
> 
> It seems the command and the option was added by the commit 0ae231e
> by Andreas Gruenbacher <address@hidden> in 2005!

That's what I found too, and the option has never been documented.

> If we don't get from anyone using the command / option in a short while,
> i'll try to write up a few lines.  Hoping someone beat me to it.

My understanding is that --charset should match what is used in the
patches themselves. The value is used for the Content-Type header of
each message and there is no conversion done.

It is also passed to the edmail helper script, which uses it to encode
the recipient names. But that is an internal detail which I don't think
the user needs to know. In fact I don't know why edmail needs to know
the charset used for the body, if the recipient fields end up being
encoded anyway it might as well always use UTF-8? But that's a somewhat
different topic, and I'm not familiar with email encoding so I could be
plain wrong.

Andreas, what would be a good description for the mail --charset
option? "Specify the character encoding of the patches."?

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support