Patches in mailing list archives

Trying to get a patch from an email message in one of the archives is painful. I'm talking about in-line patches in either the tigris.org or the contactor.se archives.

contactor.se: (e.g. http://www.contactor.se/~dast/svn/archive-2003-03/1841.shtml)
- White space is not properly handled (condensed in some places).
- Things that look like URLs are badly converted to hyperlinks (i.e. converted, but with trailing characters missing etc.).
- Lots of HTML markup used in the HTML source, making it hard to extract the original message from the HTML source.

tigris.org: (e.g. http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgId=233634)
- Uses "<pre>" and therefore much less HTML formatting in the HTML source, but still...
- Doesn't undo space-escaping of "format=flowed", so lines beginning with a space are indented by an extra space.
- Removes spaces from the end of lines: see the several (-<blank line>, +<blank line>) pairs.
(The "raw display" option is pretty much the same as the "standard display" in these regards.)

What is the software behind either of these archive viewers? Can we have any influence over it? It would be good to add a "download raw email message" option, and/or fix the bugs in their email-to-HTML converters.

To apply a patch from one old email message today, I used a mixture of manual HTML-to-email conversion and manual re-typing of the changes. What do the rest of you do?

- Julian

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Received on Sat Aug 2 02:17:57 2003