Hi Shourya,
My $0.02:
On 03/02/20 12:17PM, Shourya Shukla wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I was doing some tests on 'git send-email'[1] and noticed a couple of things:
>
> 1. We are not able to send attachments via 'git send-email' unlike
> various other mail clients such as GMail, Yahoo, etc. Is there
> any particular reason for this (maybe performance issues or code
> compatibility issues etc.)?
IMO git-send-email shouldn't really be used for sending attachments.
That is the job of other mail clients that you mention. git-send-email's
purpose is to make it easier to send commits/patches via mail in plain
text form. Its purpose is not to be a general mail client.
> 2. Even so, I tried sending an image to myself and noticed that the
> command basically does not check if we are sending a text file or
> not(though I think it should unless there is any key reason behind it).
> On executing the command(when trying to send an image), it asks for the
> encoding (that was odd as it did not ask for any of emails I have sent
> using the command). I entered the command:
> 'git send-email --to=shouryashukla.oo@xxxxxxxxx --subject=test_mail me.JPG'
> which prompts:
> 'The following files are 8bit, but do not declare a Content-Transfer-Encoding.'
> 'me.JPG'
> 'Which 8bit encoding should I declare [UTF-8]?'
> So i enter the encoding as '8BIT', which at the end prompts:
> 'No subject line in me.JPG? at /usr/lib/git-core/git-send-email line 687.'
>
> Why is this happening even though I entered the subject in the command itself?
I don't know much about the internals of git-send-email (or the JPEG
image format), but my guess is git-send-email tries to decode the JPEG
file as a text file and then fails to detect encoding, and so asks the
user explicitly what the encoding is. I don't necessarily think that is
a bad thing. You shouldn't be sending images via git-send-email.
That said, maybe it would be a good idea to check the mime type of the
file and warn the user.
> 3. I looked up at the script of the command and noticed that there are two files,
> namely: 'git-send-email.perl' and 'git-send-email', both are identical except for
> an extra 'use lib (split(/:/, $ENV{GITPERLLIB} || '/home/<<username>>/share/perl5'));'
> on line 3 of 'git-send-email'(my inference is that we are trying to import the perl
> library by splitting the addresses at '/' or something similar). What is the purpose
> of the latter file?(I am new to Perl, if I am missing out on anything please forgive
> my ignorance).
Running 'git ls-files | grep git-send-email' gives me:
Documentation/git-send-email.txt
git-send-email.perl
So it means the file 'git-send-email' is not tracked and is an output
from the build system. My guess is that the build system inserts this
line when you run 'make'. Check the file
'perl/header_templates/fixed_prefix.template.pl'.
--
Regards,
Pratyush Yadav
