Public-Service-Announcement: send-email issues with Git 2.22.0+

["Nate DeSimone" <nathaniel.l.desimone@intel.com>]

Hi Everyone,

I have been dealing with a very frustrating issue recently where all of my "CR LF" line endings get erroneously converted into "LF LF" once I send my patch to the mailing list. I have discovered the root cause for this problem. The issue is the following commit to git itself:

https://github.com/git/git/commit/5983ddc165221c3ec2a4299b65cfb2ecc1ce7765

This change is present in git version 2.20.0 or later, per the release notes:

https://github.com/git/git/blob/v2.22.0/Documentation/RelNotes/2.22.0.txt

With this change, if you leave sendemail.transferEncoding set to the default value of "auto", then git will inspect the body of your email. If it finds a '\r' character in the message, then it converts the entire message content into Quoted-Printable encoding. It appears that when groups.io converts the QP encoding back to text format, the '\r' characters somehow become '\n'. To workaround this make sure to set the following configuration option:

git config --global sendemail.transferEncoding 8bit

This will prevent send-email from converting the message into QP encoding, allowing the patches to pass through to the mailing list unharmed. Hope that saves other people a few hours of frustration.

Regards,
Nate