Antonio Radici wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 04:22:13AM -0000, Mutt wrote:
> > Comment(by Derek Martin):
> >
> > {{{
> > That's fine and dandy, but the HTTP protocol deals with them directly,
> > no need to treat them specially in terms of MIME. How HTTP treats
> > compression is not relevant to MIME processing of e-mail. MIME has
> > been embraced in many places, but its primary function is still to
> > tell e-mail clients how to handle MIME attachments according to RFC
> > 2045 and its cousins. You can't break mail because someone later
> > decided that compression was an "encoding" rather than an "application
> > data type" in some other context...
> > }}}
>
> Hi Joey,
> this looks like a very weird edge case, which was due to the fact that Debian
> has no mime-type for .gz and mutt had to fall back to its autodetection, due
> to
> the fact that the percentage of binary chars on your small .tar.gz file was a
> bit lower than 10%, it caused mutt to think that the file was a text file and,
> therefore, encode it.
>
> We could change the mutt autodetection mechanism by lowering the percentage
> but
> by doing this we are not sure that another edge case won't happen; the final
> fix
> would be to have the mime types but the maintainer of mime-support does not
> want
> to add the mime types for .gz and .bz2 because in his opinion they are
> 'encodings' and not 'mime types'.
>
> You can add your own mime types in your home directory and this won't happen
> again, unfortunately we don't think that we could have a fix for this.
>
> What do you think?Mutt upstream seems unlikely to change it, and, if Debian is the only system that does not have a mime type for gzipped data, while all the others work ok, that seems fairly reasonable. Debian's mime maintainer is using "encoding" in a sense that I am not familiar with. So I won't try to parse what he says, beyond that the gzip mime type historically caused some problem with apache, and he doesn't want to put it back. Neither of these change the fact that mutt is broken when sending gzipped files, and corrupts data in a small, unknown percentage of cases. Asking me to configure my own local mime types is not a solution; the next user to face problem is not likely to be me. Couldn't mutt check file magic to detect gz (and bz2?) files? -- see shy jo
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