Proper mime-type for patch files

Question

Anybody know what the "proper" mime-type for patch files would be? I have been using application/octet-stream because I don't see anything better at iana.org. Is application/octet-stream correct, or is there something else that fits better? Why is there no application/patch type?

Obviously, one possible answer is text/plain, but I have seen many patch files which include data which is not purely text. Is text/plain the best choice if you know for a fact all content is text, or is it better to be consistent across all patch files?

I should say the context I am mainly thinking about this in is setting mime-type as a clue to subversion about handling line-endings (svn:mime-type and svn:eol-style). The issue is that a patch file may patch both files which use eol-style native as well as non-native, which can lead to line-ending weirdness when applying a patch post-checkout.

Answer 1

I couldn't find an authoritative version either. Here's some other possibilities:

• text/x-diff
• text/x-patch
• application/x-patch

For what it's worth, Trac (a ticket tracker with good svn support) uses text/x-patch for diffs. git.kernel.org and GitHub use text/plain.

Answer 2

If your patch only contains text, I would prefer text/plain over text/x-patch or text/x-diff. IMO, text/x-patch or -diff is more suitable for this purpose, and is recommended by some projects, but the main reason for text/plain is compatibility.

In Gmail if the attachment is text/plain, when you click it it will automatically pop up a document preview; but it will not for text/x-patch or text/x-diff. Another example is the archive interface of Mailman (a popular mailing list management software): it shows the text with text/plain, but does not with text/x-patch.

If your patch contains binary data, I would use application/octet-stream, not because it is correct but it will save you some trouble from line endings.