Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] gitweb: redacted e-mail addresses feature.

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2021 15:17:04 -0700

"Georgios Kontaxis" <[email-masked]> writes:

>> ... so I doubt
>> the wisdom of munging the patch part at all.
>>
>> I may be sympathetic to the cause of the patch, but, I do not agree
>> with its execution in this iteration of the patch.
>>
> I see your point.
>
> It seems hiding e-mail addresses should be limited to the commit message,
> i.e., stop at the "---" line.

I doubt it makes sense to redact anything in the 'patch' view at
all, actually.  What kind of URL does the crawler need to formulate
and what pieces of information (like commit object names or branch
names) does it need to fill in the URL to get a series of patches
out of gitweb?  As long as it takes more effort than running "git
clone" against the repository, the crawler would not have much
incentive to crawl and harvest addresses from the 'patch' pages, and
even in the log message part, the downsides of butchering the
payload would outweigh the "privacy benefit", I would have to say.

Quite honestly, if a site claims to offer a 'patch' download UI but
returns corrupt data back, I would say it is much worse than not
offering the service at all.  Perhaps disabling the 'patch' feature
in repositories that enable 'privacy' feature may be a much better
approach.