Applying patches from gmane can be dangerous.

I picked up the qsort patch from Brian while reading the list via gmane's newsfeed and applied it without realizing that it was one of the articles whose addresses on all the address header fields _and_ all strings that look like e-mail addresses have been mangled by gmane. Sign-offs by Dscho and Steffen Prohaska have also been munged (even though that are not part of headers).

It already is part of 'next', and we have the policy of not rewinding 'next', so the record of this mistake will unfortunately be with us forever. Sorry, Brian, Dscho and Steffen.

For the curious, the message was:

    http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/72699/raw

I've added the following in my .git/hooks/applypatch-msg and made it executable, so hopefully it won't happen again.

    #!/bin/sh
    case "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" in
    *@public.gmane.org)
            echo >&2 "Gmane munged the author's email address, aborting."
            echo >&2 "Pick up the original message from your mbox!"
            exit 1
            ;;
    esac

This is really sad. gmane gives us a clean threaded interface (both in web and newsreader), and it never forgets. Whenever I need to refer somebody to an old discussion, I can give an URL to it and allmost all the discussion messages are there with a single paste and clicking around. It has been an indispensable service to me ever since I started reading the git list with it. It is really a shame that I have to prevent picking up patch messages from it with the above hook.

I am wondering if other development communities had a similar issue already, and if so how they are dealing with it.