[darcs-devel] [issue1350] compress patch bundles for more reliable transport ?

Simon Michael bugs at darcs.net
Sun Feb 8 19:21:30 UTC 2009


New submission from Simon Michael <simon at joyful.com>:

There are many non-obvious ways for a patch received by email to get  
corrupted as you extract it. Whitespace and encoding are important,  
and darcs apply's error messages are unhelpful (separate issue). In  
fact applying patches from contributors is the bane of my life, and  
this should not be, we want this to just work without requiring  
expertise. Gwern suggested gzipping patch bundles, and I suggested  
including the plain text as well  (because being able to see the patch  
immediately is very useful for patch review.)

So, it seems right now a sent patch mail has a text/plain part  
containing just the comment, and a text/x-darcs-patch part containing  
the patch with context (I may oversimplify.)

What if we: gzip the x-darcs-patch part, and also include just the  
patch but not the context in the text/plain part, for human readers.  
Also, darcs apply would accept gzipped patch bundles. I think this  
could make patch-accepting more robust and no harder. It would also do  
away with the visual noise cause by having the context always  
included, and would reduce the size of darcs patch emails quite a bit.

Sent to the list as well as the bugtracker to get wider feedback.

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messages: 7282
nosy: darcs-users, dmitry.kurochkin, kowey, simon, thorkilnaur
status: unread
title: compress patch bundles for more reliable transport ?

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Darcs bug tracker <bugs at darcs.net>
<http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1350>
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