[MPlayer-dev-eng] Patches that are base64 encoded are useless in mail archives

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 12:51:11AM -0500, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> I don't know if the general feeling is that patches sent are better
> base64 encoded or not, but just as a datapoint, when they are, they
> are completely useless in the mailing list archive.
> 
> Yes, I suppose I could cut'n'paste the encoded part out and convince
> either mutt or some perl tool to unwind it, but really, that is a lot
> of work for relatively little benefit in sending them encoded.
> 
> If having them tar.gz.base64 is really that important, then the
> mailing list archiver should detach attachments, decode them into
> their native format (.tar.gz for instance) put them on a web/ftp
> server and replace the base64 encoded attachment block with the URL to
> the decoded file.

who said .tar.gz? base64 is just to prevent broken mailers from
messing up the spaces/tabs/linebreaks. this is probably a much more
common problem than you're aware of.

btw, there are command line programs you can pipe base64 encoded data
through to decode it without any weird hacks, so i don't see how it's
a serious problem. search freshmeat or something for one.

rich