This is a patch series with some history, if you will forgive the semi-inadvertant pun. I list that at that end, for the curious. If this series goes in, in the future we might consider whether restore --accumulate provides important functionality over batch tagging; at the moment I suggest leaving it as the extra code to support it is minimal, and it does support peoples existing scripts using the old dump/restore format. History ------- About 1 year ago, Petter Reinholdtsen observed a problem with dumping and restoring message-id's with spaces in them. id:2flfwhht87d.fsf@diskless.uio.no There followed a proposed fix id:1323808075-7417-1-git-send-email-david@tethera.net Which Dmitry had a few helpful things to say about the hex encoding libs. Jani took that foundation and proposed two versions of the batch tagging, most recently at id:cover.1334404979.git.jani@nikula.org. There was some discussion with Jamie about the file format for batch tagging in the thread id:cover.1333231401.git.jani@nikula.org id:1323808075-7417-1-git-send-email-david@tethera.net The first 6 of these patches obsolete the series id:1345382314-5330-1-git-send-email-david@tethera.net which was revied by Tomi and Ethan. I think I implemented their suggestions. Although I didn't re-read that whole thread, I believe this version of the patches address's Jamie's concerns by using exactly the same format for restore and tag --batch (renamed from Jani's choice of --stdin).