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.