git-mailinfo doesn't stop parsing at the end of the header

Hello,

today, after working on a topic branch and trying to rebase it on top of the updated master, the rebase failed, complaining about an invalid email address.

Some investigating revealed an interesting quirk in git-mailinfo which seems to be a bit too eager to extract author information: Instead of just looking at the From:-Line in a mails header (git-rebase seems to use git-am which in turn uses git-mailinfo), it searches for "from:" *anywhere* in the mail and uses the last found information as the source for the author information.

In this case, git-format-patch has generated a file that looks something like this:

--------------8<---------------

From d28f21ea8ca64681ba7756417799ceea81ad6873 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Foo Bar <foo@bar.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:27:25 +0100
Subject: blah, blah, blah

from:
- this is a
- list for stuff
---
 list/of/changed/files                   |    1 -
 list/of/changed/files2                  |    1 -
 2 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

the actual diff down here

--------------8<---------------

And when you feed this into mailinfo, this is what you get:

pilif@celes ~/git % git mailinfo /dev/null /dev/null < somepatch.patch
Author:
Email:
Subject: blah, blah, blah
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:27:25 +0100

pilif@celes ~/git %

and consequently, anything that depends on the correct author being extracted then fails.

While I know it's rude to have a line beginning with "from:" (and it's even ruder to have a line beginning with "from "), IMHO the header ends at the first blank line and I see no reason to extract author information past the header.

And if this is in fact intended behavior, it should probably not be permitted to create a commit that later on can't be rebased or applied using git-am.

I had a look at the source of git-mailinfo to fix it myself, but this thing does too much for my minimal knowledge in C.

Philip