-the file you fed to it. Either your download is broken or you tried to feed
-patch a compressed patch file without uncompressing it first.
+the file you fed to it. Either your download is broken, you tried to feed
+patch a compressed patch file without uncompressing it first, or the patch
+file that you are using has been mangled by a mail client or mail transfer
+agent along the way somewhere, e.g., by splitting a long line into two lines.
+Often these warnings can easily be fixed by joining (concatenating) the
+two lines that had been split.