Re: [PATCH] Change attachment stamping to use stat st_mtime by default.

"Kevin J. McCarthy" <[email protected]> Sun, 23 Aug 2026 16:45:48 +0800

Newsgroups	gmane.mail.mutt.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 08:46:52AM +0200, Rene Kita wrote:
>On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 12:57:02PM +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
>> Editing an attachment after attaching it (with a normal tool; recode is
>> known to be an aberration).
>
>I can't remember I ever saw that message, but I don't quite get it:
>Attachment #2 modified. Update encoding for /tmp/f? ([yes]/no):
>
>This is after an 'echo a >> /tmp/f'. Why "Update encoding"?

Mutt scans the attachment to determine whether to use 7-bit, 8-bit, QP, 
or Base64 encoding.  It wants to make sure the encoding is still 
appropriate.  This can also manually be edited via ^E <edit-encoding> in 
the compose menu.

It also scans text types to determine the charset to be used.

>> Honestly, the protections offered have been minimal, but they've been that
>> way for 30 years without any tickets or reported issues.  So, I'd need to be
>> convinced this suddenly requires a redo using hashes.
>
>I wonder what behaviour people would expect these days, when attaching a
>file is it a link to the current version or a snapshot of the file when
>it was attached?

By default it points directly at the attachment, but you can use 
<get-attachment> to copy it to tmpdir, to prevent updates from touching 
mutt's version.

>I'd guess it is the former. So I'd say that the reason
>that no one reported an issue might that people don't expect it and
>never notice. I don't look at the attachments in my +Sent.

Yeah, they might not.  The receiver might notice if the encoding was 
wrong for a text attachment that suddenly had 8-bit chars added.  I 
agree though, this is hard to say.

>That being said, I think the approach in v2 looks good to me as a fix
>for the current behavior.

Thanks!

-- 
Kevin J. McCarthy
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