There are many non-obvious ways for a patch received by email to get  
corrupted as you extract it. Whitespace and encoding are important,  
and darcs apply's error messages are unhelpful (separate issue). In  
fact applying patches from contributors is the bane of my life, and  
this should not be, we want this to just work without requiring  
expertise. Gwern suggested gzipping patch bundles, and I suggested  
including the plain text as well  (because being able to see the patch  
immediately is very useful for patch review.)

So, it seems right now a sent patch mail has a text/plain part  
containing just the comment, and a text/x-darcs-patch part containing  
the patch with context (I may oversimplify.)

What if we: gzip the x-darcs-patch part, and also include just the  
patch but not the context in the text/plain part, for human readers.  
Also, darcs apply would accept gzipped patch bundles. I think this  
could make patch-accepting more robust and no harder. It would also do  
away with the visual noise cause by having the context always  
included, and would reduce the size of darcs patch emails quite a bit.

Sent to the list as well as the bugtracker to get wider feedback.

Simon Michael wrote:
> What if we: gzip the x-darcs-patch part, and also include just the
> patch but not the context in the text/plain part, for human readers.
> Also, darcs apply would accept gzipped patch bundles. I think this
> could make patch-accepting more robust and no harder. It would also do
> away with the visual noise cause by having the context always
> included, and would reduce the size of darcs patch emails quite a bit.

+1. I think this sounds like a good idea.

Sounds like it would be best for somebody to just submit a patch and then we
discuss it later on darcs-users.

I split the bit where darcs apply accepts gzipped patches into its own ticket,
which is a superseder of this one.

There's a patch needing review: patch515

The following patch sent by Gabriel Kerneis <kerneis@pps.jussieu.fr> updated issue issue1350 with
status=resolved;resolvedin=2.8.0 HEAD

* resolve issue1350: reliable patch transport 
Ignore-this: 5cf8cbafdcebe16124c629edb465f739

Note that this patch does not compress attached patches, for the sake
of backward-compatibility.  But it does resolve the points of issue1350:
hide context when reviewing a patch and ensure a reliable transport with
application/x-darcs-patch instead of text/x-darcs-patch.