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

"Georgios Kontaxis" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

... 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.

No effort at all I would say.
E..g, somehow the web crawler gets to git.kernel.org.
It then follows every link, eventually arriving at a commitdiff page.
It then follows every link, which includes the URL for the patch output.
See how "wget --mirror" behaves for instance.

Just to clarify, my goal is not to stop someone who wants to extract
e-mail address from git.kernel.org specifically.
They can just "git clone" the repositories and grep through the logs.
My goal is to stop generic crawlers (pretty much "wget --mirror | grep"
scripts) from making their way to the logs.

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.

Good point. I think I'll try that.