Short story:
Patches that touch non-Latin1 .rc files might need to be sent as attached non-text files rather than inline or as .txt files, to avoid charset corruption.
Some examples: http://winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2008-August/059095.html might suffer corruption (I can't tell offhand).
http://winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2008-August/059405.html looks safe, though.
Long story:
Patchwatcher was converting patches to utf-8, causing the patch [1/3] wined3d: Move creating a texture id from PreLoad to BindTexture to not apply. Thanks to Henri Verbeet for diagnosing the problem.
The patchwatcher web page may need some surgery to deal with this. Currently it uses a single .txt file for the email message and the patch, which probably tempts the web server and browser to do charset conversions. I will probably switch the suffix to .bin to discourage this.
Even longer story:
So, what character set is the Wine source tree encoded with? It looks like a mixture:
1. in general, .c and .h files are encoded in Latin-1 aka iso8859-1.
2. include/*.h are encoded in ASCII and are not allowed to have non-ascii chars; see http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5420
3. *_XX.rc (or XX.rc) are in the character set that Windows defaults to for language XX, unless changed by a #pragma code_page... in the .rc file. http://wiki.winehq.org/Developers-Hints#head-ef42a958e4f633dbd4a0ae42649fa02...
Which brings us to the question: since email clients love changing charsets of text messages, how can we avoid corrupting patches when sending them via email? It kind of looks like patches to .rc files must be attached rather than inline, and should be attached as .patch, .diff, or .bin files so they are marked with the mime type application/octet-stream which should inhibit all charset conversions. (Attaching as .txt might tempt mail clients to perform charset conversions on them.) - Dan